A recipe for disaster

The pursuit of a COVID-19 vaccine should not prioritize speed over safety

An excerpted editorial from the Los Angeles Times

It will take at least a year to do the testing and clinical trials necessary to ensure that a vaccine candidate is safe for mass production. So it’s more than a little unsettling that President Donald Trump’s effort to expedite a vaccine for COVID-19 has a significantly shortened timeline, one that seems suspiciously connected to the political calendar rather than sound science.

Operation Warp Speed, as its name implies, aims not just to have a viable vaccine candidate by the end of the year, but to have 300 million doses ready for the American public by January through a joint effort of government and the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an aspirational deadline, to be sure, but one that suggests shortcuts to the usual scientific standards.

History is filled with tales of slapdash efforts that had disastrous results. The one relevant to this moment is the terrible mishap that occurred in the rush to stop a polio outbreak in the 1940s and ’50s that was killing thousands of Americans. After a year of clinical trials, a vaccine was licensed to six companies to manufacture quickly to meet the demand of a desperately worried public.

But some of the batches made by California-based Cutter Laboratories failed to deactivate the live virus and ended up causing 40,000 polio infections, killing 10 children and leaving dozens more paralyzed. The incident led to better government oversight of vaccine production, but it’s also a cautionary tale about cutting regulatory corners.

It’s not a bad idea to marshal the full force of government and military to fast-track development of a vaccine and give it regulatory priority. But though this is a race of sorts, it’s not one that will be won with speed alone.