Making Doses

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Anchor lead: The vaccine candidates for COVID-19 offer hope, and may be here sooner than we think, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Vaccines based on proteins and nucleic acids are some of the candidates for a vaccine against COVID-19, and almost all of them utilize technology quite different from that used to make other kinds of vaccines. Andrew Pekosz, a vaccine expert at Johns Hopkins, says this shift is likely to bear fruit, and federal agencies are supporting it.

Pekosz: If you can find a good vaccine that works in 100 people, or 1000 people, how do you get from that to immunizing 10 million people in a reasonable amount of time. I think that’s one credit to the federal government response right now, is that people are thinking a few steps ahead of the time, and they are investing in manufacturing capabilities of some of these companies, it’s a bit of a gamble, it’s a risk. They’re assuming that some of these will work, and so they’re investing in the manufacturing capabilities of some of these companies so that they can scale up.  :29

Pekosz says everyone can also have confidence that oversight is rigorous and that safety as well as efficacy are front and center. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.