The most important thing to say at the outset is that there was nothing wrong with the thinking of the experts who were pessimistic about developing a vaccine to COVID-19.
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Not only had we never been able to develop a vaccine to coronavirus previously, we had never developed and produced a vaccine in anywhere near the timeframes that were being discussed.
What we have been able to do is nothing short of the medical equivalent of climbing Mount Everest. And we have not just developed a single vaccine - we have developed a number of them with more to become available over the next year.
That we were able to achieve this is due to a number of factors. First, we were able to build on development work already conducted on SARS and MERS which gave us a head start. Second, there had been a great deal of progress on new vaccine technologies that had occurred in the past few years that turned out to be perfectly suited for developing a COVID-19 vaccine.
Third, given we were facing a once-in-a-generation public health emergency and the stakes were so high, governments immediately made funding available. No time was wasted procuring funding which is usually a time consuming process.
Fourth, for the first time in history, vaccines were being made concurrently while they were being tested. This is something that the economics of producing vaccines would never have allowed previously, but this crisis has been a game-changer.
Although there are a number of other factors that contributed to the situation we are now in, one cannot discount the influence of luck.
They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity, and we definitely made our own luck by having many horses in the race at the same time.
Now the focus needs to be getting the vaccines to as many people as we can as quickly as we can.
- Hassan Vally is an associate professor in the Department of Public Health at La Trobe University.
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