In early 2020, Academician Gao Fu “patted his chest” and said that the vaccine would definitely be developed.
He then added: “It takes a long, long time to develop a vaccine, to study a vaccine, but from what we’ve known about SARS or this type of virus in the past, I can say with a pat on the back that this vaccine will be successful.”

It’s not hard to see how when scientists started developing a vaccine for SARS-COV-2 in early 2020, everyone was wary of making promises like “quick success.”
The success of mumps vaccine development in the 1960s was the fastest recorded vaccine preparation, taking only four years from sampling to approval.
It is therefore highly optimistic that a COVID-19 vaccine will be developed by the summer of 2021.

In early December, however, researchers working on several vaccines announced excellent results in large-scale trials and demonstrated the feasibility of a COVID-19 vaccine.
On December 2nd a vaccine produced by Pfizer, a pharmaceutical giant, in partnership with Bio NTech, a German biotech firm, became the first fully tested vaccine that could be used in an emergency.

Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, says the rate of advancement of COVID-19 vaccines “challenges every paradigm we can think of in vaccine development.”
At the same time, Natalie Dean points out that if we can produce other vaccines at the same rate as COVID-19 vaccines on a competitive timeline, it’s going to be amazing.
Diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia kill millions of people every year, and new and deadly viruses are on the rise. If the speed of COVID-19 vaccine development is applied to the development of vaccines for these diseases, the impact will be immeasurable.

Dan Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Harvard Medical School, says there is no doubt that the COVID-19 experience will change the future of vaccine science.
He said the current rate of development of COVID-19 vaccines showed that when there is a real global emergency, the vaccine can be developed at an unexpected rate, given adequate resources.
And new vaccine manufacturing methods, such as using mrnas, have been validated by the clinical response to COVID-19.
Researchers have also greatly accelerated the progress of the COVID-19 vaccine without compromising the safety of the people who are trying it.

Analysis of the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccine in the world can be attributed to the following reasons: 1. Previous studies on relevant viruses have laid a theoretical foundation; 2.

2. Faster ways to make vaccines;
3. The huge capital investment enables the company to carry out multiple tests at the same time;
4. Regulators acted faster than normal.
   Some of these factors could translate into lessons for other vaccines, particularly faster production platforms.

Still, there is no guarantee that this “quickness” will replicate perfectly with other viruses.
To achieve such rapid success again will require an equally large operational investment.
That is only possible with a similar sense of social and political urgency.
At the same time, the nature of the pathogen itself determines the feasibility of such “repeatability”.
In short, the emergence of SARS-COV-2, a relatively slow mutation that happens to belong to a well-studied family of viruses, was fortunate for scientists.

For years, scientists around the world have focused on the coronaviruses that cause SARS (severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome), including the development of new vaccines. This has laid a solid foundation for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, and has been surprisingly rewarding.
Vaccines made by Pfizer, BioNTech and Modena all use mrnas that encode spikes, which dock with human cell membranes and allow coronaviruses to invade cells.

Immunologist Akiko Iwasaki of the Yale School of Medicine comments that basic research on DNA vaccines has been going on for at least 25 years, and RNA vaccines have benefited from 10 to 15 years of robust research, including some cancer vaccines.
RNA technology was not mature enough five years ago, but is now basically on the road to perfection.
Researchers at the Us National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) concluded from their studies on MERS and SARS that mRNA vaccine antigen design of spike proteins requires sufficient adjustment of RNA sequence to stabilize the resulting spike proteins before docking with host cells.
The third vaccine, which is being tested in a phase III clinical trial in November and is being made by The University of Oxford and AstraZeneca, does not use mRNA, but uses the viral vector (or carrier) to hold the genetic material that encodes sarS-COV-2 spike protein.
It also benefited from years of research into the carrier — the company chose a modified form of adenovirus isolated from chimpanzee feces.
Beate Kampmann, director of the Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said progress on these routine vaccines had also come from studies of SARS, MERS, Ebola and malaria, and that the method was still cheaper than using mRNA.

Vaccine researchers were mostly infected with SARS-COV-2 for various reasons, Iwasaki said.
Unlike HIV, herpes or even the flu, this virus does not mutate in large numbers and does not suppress the human immune system.
The herpes virus, by contrast, has more evasive effects-preventing antibodies from binding, which makes it difficult to find effective drugs to fight it;
The rapid mutation of the flu virus requires a different vaccine formulation for each flu season.

Funding: The slowest part of vaccine development is not finding candidate treatments, but testing them.
First, companies test the efficacy and safety of animals, then they test humans, and human testing involves three stages, including an increase in the number of people and a proportionate increase in costs, which usually takes several years.
The COVID-19 vaccine has gone through the same trials — billions of vaccines are being poured into the process, requiring companies not only to run some tests simultaneously, but also to be able to take financial risks.

Rino Rappuoli, chief scientist at GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division in Italy, says large sums of money provided to vaccine companies through public funders and private philanthropists can be used to conduct both pre-clinical and phase I, II and III trials or even vaccine manufacturing, rather than in sequence.
This means that companies can take the risk of starting large-scale testing and manufacturing of vaccine candidates that may not be able to solve COVID-19, which completely “upsets” the entire development process.

Without such funding, vaccine research would not have produced such rapid results.
For example, the Ebola virus that occurred from 2014 to 2016 was not funded on such a large scale, which caused a devastating impact on African communities, and it took a very long time to develop a vaccine for Ebola.
This time, the money has been cashed in because all countries — rich and poor — are facing this catastrophic COVID-19 outbreak.
Similar to ebola, future vaccine development, including for existing diseases like malaria, will not be as rapid.
But “there is no way to accelerate unless you invest money”.

Peter Hotez, a virologist at Baylor College of Medicine, believes that big pharma may be motivated not just by a desire to stop the epidemic, but by the opportunity to gain government funding for its research and in-depth development.
It has to be acknowledged that previous infectious and deadly viruses contributed to the establishment of national and global infrastructures to facilitate faster vaccine development.
The ebola and Zika outbreaks, for example, provide a better global coordination mechanism for how to respond to infectious disease crises.

In particular, the Alliance for Pandemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) was launched in 2017.
The goal is to build the technological infrastructure needed to rapidly develop vaccines against several viruses with known epidemic potential, including MERS, Ebola and Zika.
In the final phase of the trial, CEPI assisted in the development of a vaccine for COVID-19.
The experience of COVID-19 has also prompted regulators to rethink.
While strict vaccine approval criteria have not been relaxed, most of the first vaccine candidates have been approved under emergency use regulations.

Other vaccine development: The COVID-19 pandemic should see some permanent changes in vaccine development.
First, mRNA vaccines — which have never been approved before — will revolutionize vaccinology.
It is not hard to see that mRNA vaccines can be chemically synthesized in a few days, in contrast to the more complex biotechnology that produces proteins in cells.
RNA greatly simplifies the manufacturing process and can be used to make RNA for different diseases in the same way, reducing the investment required and increasing the company’s production capacity.

Still, other vaccines are likely to be developed at a similar pace only at high levels of infection, so that large-scale trials can be carried out relatively quickly and with substantial funding.
Other viruses may be more difficult to deal with than SARS-COV-2.

According to the statistics, there are at least 24 virus families that can infect humans, and we know little about the related virus families.
Rather than waiting for resources to be devoted to the next virus to pop up, it would be better to spend money now to set up a system to monitor all these viruses.
In other words, no amount of money will help without a solid scientific platform to back it up.
The success of the COVID-19 vaccine is a good example of how science can do or even accomplish something very quickly, but it doesn’t happen overnight.