How has a Covid vaccine been developed so quickly?
How has it been possible to develop vaccines against Covid-19 in less than a year?
A key consideration is funding – public and private cash has been poured into the race for a Covid vaccine, pushing aside the usual financial concerns facing pharmaceutical companies. What’s more, demand and urgency are high.
“The fact that governments pre-bought the vaccines meant that people could take greater risks with what they did at an earlier stage without having to take one step at a time,” said Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Traditionally, vaccines are developed by weakening it or killing a virus, or by producing part of the virus in the lab. However this is time consuming.
Instead, both the Oxford University/AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines were developed using different “platform technologies” that involve slotting genetic material from the virus into a tried and tested delivery package. Once introduced into the human body this genetic material is used by the protein-making machinery in our cells to churn out the coronavirus “spike protein”, triggering an immune response.
This
approach was aided by the speed at which scientists in China identified
and shared the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus, and work that
was already under way on other coronaviruses.
How has the UK managed to approve vaccines before Europe and the US?
While there has been much talk about how Brexit might have aided the speedy approval of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine by the MHRA, experts have stressed EU laws allow member states to approve medicines for emergency use without authorisation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA).
However Evans said the Brexit transition period might mean the MHRA currently had some extra capacity.
“We are in this slightly weird position where we haven’t had to do the work that we will have to do from 1 January, and we haven’t got the work we’d normally be doing for the EMA,” he said .
But Ward said other factors were important. “In order for [a] product to be approved [by the EMA], the [EU] member states have to agree the conditions of its use,” she said, noting that it took more discussion than if only one state was involved. Another possibility is that Europe may wish to wait to until it is known that there is little variation from batch to batch of vaccine.
