Experts warn coronavirus vaccine isn’t coming very quickly
3882 Mins Read
The development of vaccines against the coronavirus is in full swing. Nevertheless, it will still take at least a year before one is available on the market.
ust a month has passed since Chinese scientists decoded the genetic information of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and made it available to the global research community. Numerous research-based pharmaceutical companies, universities and other research institutions then immediately got to work.
In the meantime, the number of labs working at full speed on the development of a vaccine to combat SARS-CoV-2 has grown to such an extent that it is difficult to maintain an overview.
In addition to the large research institutes, such as the National Institute for Viral Control and Prevention in mainland China, researchers in Hong Kong, the USA, Germany, France, Australia, Canada and Israel are busy developing vaccines.
Some research groups have announced that they’ll accelerate vaccine development by setting very ambitious schedules, sometimes as short as a few weeks.
German experts, however, view such announcements very critically. Infection epidemiologist Dr. Alexander Kekulé, who heads the Institute of Medical Microbiology at the University Hospital in Halle, assumes that an approved vaccine could be launched on the market in 2021 at the earliest.
“There is no way we’ll have a vaccine by autumn [2020],” the professor of medicine said during a debate on German public television.
Kekulé also explained that developing a vaccine against coronaviruses is particularly difficult, because coronaviruses are genetically very mutable.
The rapid mutability of the coronaviruses is also one of the reasons why there are no vaccinations against the common, seasonal cold viruses. At least yet. Most of these cold viruses are also coronaviruses, albeit far more harmless than SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2 or MERS.
