Some Upside

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Anchor lead: Even as we wait for a Covid-19 vaccine, the process of vaccine development has been vastly improved, Elizabeth Tracey reports

A given year’s flu vaccine has often not quite matched the strains of the virus circulating, due to the time needed to make the vaccine and other constraints. Now Andrew Pekosz, a vaccine expert at Johns Hopkins, says those days may be behind us with lessons learned from the development of Sars-CoV2 vaccines.

Pekosz: The time line for moving a vaccine through testing into real world vaccination campaigns can be shortened without a compromise in terms of safety. If that’s one lasting legacy of this pandemic it would really be tremendous because there’s so many vaccines that are mired in the moving through the phase one, two three process. So many companies just don’t want to move forward with new vaccine formulations because they’re essentially being told they have to work through this 15 year process.  :30

Pekosz says a more nimble vaccine development and manufacturing process will also allow the system to respond rapidly as new viruses and different strains of old ones emerge. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.