As pressure grows, virus vaccine race ramps up
The intensity for a ‘holy grail’ reaches breakneck pace
WASHINGTON — Four months after a mysterious new virus began its deadly march around the globe, the search for a vaccine has taken on an intensity never before seen in medical research, with huge implications for public health, the world economy and politics.
Seven of the roughly 90 projects being pursued by governments, pharmaceutical makers, biotech innovators and academic laboratories have reached the stage of clinical trials. With political leaders — not least President Donald Trump — increasingly pressing for progress, and with big potential profits at stake for the industry, drugmakers and researchers have signaled that they are moving ahead at unheard-of speeds.
But the whole enterprise remains dogged by uncertainty about whether any coronavirus vaccine will prove effective, how fast it could be made available to millions or billions of people and whether the rush — compressing a process that can take 10 years into 10 months — will sacrifice safety.
Some experts say the more immediately promising field might be the development of treatments to speed recovery from COVID-19, an approach that has generated some optimism in the last week through initially encouraging research results on remdesivir, an antiviral drug once tried against Ebola.
In an era of intense nationalism, the geopolitics of the vaccine race are growing as complex as the medicine. Months of mutual vilification between the United States and China over the origins of the virus have poisoned most efforts at cooperation between them. The U.S. government is already warning that American innovations must be protected from theft — chiefly from Beijing.
“Biomedical research has long been a focus of theft, especially by the Chinese government, and vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus are today’s holy grail,” John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, said Friday. “We will use all the tools we have to safeguard American research.”
The intensity of the global research effort is such that governments and companies are building production lines before they have anything to produce.
“You don’t wait until you get an answer before you start manufacturing.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the federal government’s top expert on infectious diseases, said this past week.
With the demand for a vaccine so intense, there are escalating calls for “human-challenge trials” to speed the process: tests in which volunteers are injected with a potential vaccine and then deliberately exposed to the coronavirus.
Because the approach involves exposing participants to a potentially deadly disease, challenge trials are ethically fraught. But they could be faster than simply inoculating human subjects and waiting for them to be exposed.
Even when promising solutions are found, there are big challenges to scaling up production and distribution. Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder whose foundation is spending $250 million to help spur vaccine development, has warned about a critical shortage of medical glass.
Without sufficient supplies of the glass, there will be too few vials to transport the billions of doses that will ultimately be needed.
The scale of the problem and the demand for a quick solution are bound to create tensions between the profit motives of the pharmaceutical industry, which typically fights hard to wring the most out of their investments in new drugs, and the public’s need for quick action to get any effective vaccines to as many people as possible.
Given the proliferation of vaccine projects, the best outcome may be none of them emerging as a clear winner.
“Let’s say we get one vaccine quickly but we can only get 2 million doses of it at the end of next year,” said Anita Zaidi, who directs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s vaccine development program. “And another vaccine, just as effective, comes three months later but we can make a billion doses. Who won that race?”
The answer, she said, “is we will need many different vaccines to cross the finish line.”
It is one thing to design a vaccine in record time. It is a different challenge to manufacture and distribute one on a scale never attempted — billions of doses, transported at below-zero temperatures to nearly every corner of the world.
“If you want to give a vaccine to a billion people, it better be very safe and very effective,” said Dr. Paul Stoffels, chief scientific officer of Johnson & Johnson. “But you also need to know how to make it in amounts we’ve never really seen before.”