Life will not return to normal until we have a vaccine for COVID-19! This is a common sentiment expressed by many world leaders as well as healthcare officials around the globe.
Fortunately, work on developing a vaccine for COVID-19 is well underway.
Up until recently, vaccines would take 5 to 10 years to develop, some even longer. Scientific innovations, however, could substantially reduce the time to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.
Nevertheless, even the most optimistic estimates call for 12 months from the initial work begun in January 2020 before a vaccine is available for general use.
Even then, mass inoculation will be constrained by the availability of manufacturing facilities able to produce the vaccine.
This article covers:
- Is a vaccine the answer to the COVID-19 pandemic
- Will a COVID-19 vaccine be easy to develop
- Economics of developing a COVID-19 vaccine
- Who is working on a COVID-19 vaccine
- Funding for the COVID-19 vaccine
- When will a COVID-19 vaccine be available to the public
Is a Vaccine the Answer to the COVID-19 Pandemic
A vaccine is not a cure for a disease, but it can be a powerful tool to prevent the virus spreading.
As it will take some time to develop, however, a COVID-19 vaccine is not likely to play a role in containing this initial outbreak, as is often the case with new vaccines.
In 2002 another coronavirus, Sars-CoV, began spreading around China causing SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome).
A few vaccine candidates were developed in 2003 which showed promising results when tested on animals.
Unfortunately, this development work was started late due to a lack of information being shared with the medical community outside of China at the start of the outbreak.
By the time vaccine candidates for SARS were ready to be tested on humans other containment measures had already led to the virus virtually disappearing. Funding for continued testing for the vaccine, therefore, dried up.
Treatments Before a Vaccine
As COVID-19 spreads around the world, improved therapeutics are likely to be developed before a vaccine.
Dr. John Shiver, Sanofi Pasteur’s senior vice president of global vaccine research and development, said on March 2nd, 2020 “A therapeutic could be developed in months or a very short amount of time, a year or so. Vaccines typically take longer.”
COVID-19 Vaccine is Still Crucial
As we entered February, it became clear that the Sars-CoV-2 virus, unlike SARS-CoV, is likely here to stay.
So it is imperative that scientists continue working on the COVID-19 vaccine even if current containment efforts show good results. A vaccine will be crucial to stopping or at least containing a second wave of COVID-19.
This approach was proven wise, if not financially so, when it came to Ebola. Vaccine candidates which began development during early outbreaks did not play a role in containing the spread of the disease in West Africa in 2013, but were ready and proved very helpful when Ebola broke out again in DR Congo in 2018.
Indeed, the COVID-19 vaccine could become analogous to the annual flu shot; highly recommended to be taken by large population groups each year.
As Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), stated ” The only way you can completely suppress an emerging infectious disease is with a vaccine”.
Charu Kaushic, scientific director of Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Institute of Infection and Immunity seconded this urgent call for a COVID-19 vaccine, stating ”It’s spreading everywhere. If we had a vaccine, we could control it.”
Will a COVID-19 Vaccine be Easy to Develop
Dr. Peter Hotez from Baylor college stated “Every virus has its challenges, but coronaviruses can be a relatively straightforward vaccine target”.
Unfortunately, this is not the opinion of all experts. Professor Allen Cheng, an advisor to the Australian government on COVID-19 and a leading infectious disease specialist stated “It’s not like we haven’t tried to make a coronavirus vaccine before. SARS, MERS, people have been working on a common cold vaccine for a while. We could get lucky, But I’m not that optimistic that we’ll get one soon. Two years I think would be pretty good going.”
Safety is always a critical issue for new vaccines. Pointing to the disastrous rollout of a vaccine to prevent dengue fever in 2016 when some children died after having taken the vaccine Prof. Cheng stated “You have to make sure it doesn’t cause cancer”.
Mutating Sars-CoV-2 Virus Could Affect a COVID-19 Vaccine
Another challenge to developing a new vaccine is that viruses often mutate; sometimes causing the original vaccine to lose its efficacy.
Such was the case for vaccines developed in response to the H7N9 bird flu in China outbreak. The US government concluded that stock piles of vaccines they had prepared for H7N9 would not be effective against a new strain which later appeared.
This is also the reason the vaccine for influenza, also known as the annual flu shot, needs to be adjusted each year.
Scientists try to predict which strain(s) of the flu will be prominent in the coming winter and ask drug companies to produce the corresponding version of the vaccine. They are not always right, and sometimes people who have been vaccinated still end up catching the flu.
In early March 2020 it was reported that Sars-CoV-2, the official name of the COVID-19 virus, has already mutated into at least 2 distinct strains.
However, experts from other countries have cast doubt on this presumption by Chinese scientists. They believe the genomic data analyzed does not point to a distinct second strain of Sars-CoV-2.
Another report from Iceland did state that two strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been found in the same patient in late March 2020. However, small mutations of a virus are very common and do not necessarily have any affect on the efficacy of a vaccine.
Derek Gatherer, an infectious disease specialist at Lancaster University stated “This is much as we would expect. All viruses accumulate mutations, but few of them are of much medical consequence. They are valuable in tracing the origins of infection chains.”
Economics of Developing a Vaccine
Apart from taking a long time to develop, new vaccines require huge investments.
The cost of one program to develop a new vaccine from scratch (pre-clinical stage) through to the end of successful late stage clinical trials on humans (Phase 3) has been estimated at $US 31–68 million. This is presuming everything goes smoothly and there are no failures along the way.
Taking into consideration the normal case of several different R&D programs working on the same vaccine and producing many failed candidates along the way, it has been estimated that about US$500 million is spent before a successful vaccine is ready for public use.
Vaccines are Often Money Losers
The R&D investment does not include the costs for the facilities to manufacture the vaccine once it is ready for general use.
Even after vaccines are available to the general public, most of them don’t generate large revenues. The market for a vaccine for new viral diseases is usually quite small and this market is often found only in poorer countries.
In a panel at the Aspen Institute on February 11th, 2020, Ron Klain, former White House Ebola Response Coordinator, aka Ebola Czar, under President Obama stated “I don’t work for the companies, I’m not like a drug company fan, but there’s no question that a lot of them lost a lot of money trying to produce an Ebola vaccine.”
In the early days of the COVID-19 outbreak none of the biggest vaccine makers; Pfizer, MSD, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and Sanofi showed much interest in investing their own money to develop a vaccine.
Who is Working on a Vaccine for COVID-19
COVID-19 vaccine development programs have already been launched in multiple countries including Australia, China, the US, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, India, and Canada.
Universities including the University of Queensland, Imperial College of London, and Shanghai Tongji University are putting their top researchers into these programs.
Biotech companies such as Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Moderna Therapeutics, CureVac, and Clover Biopharmaceuticals were early movers in developing vaccine candidates.
Multi-national pharmaceutical companies such as Sanofi Pasteur and Johnson & Johnson have now joined in the race as it has become evident that a COVID-19 vaccine will find a huge market.
And even militaries from the US and China are in on the action.
These programs are using several different approaches to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.
Funding for the COVID-19 Vaccine
The overall investment into a COVID-19 vaccine is surely to exceed the average US$500 million R&D investment mentioned above.
The Wellcome Trust, a medical research charity, estimates it could cost up to $8 billion to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
Fortunately, apart from multi-national pharmaceutical companies there are several new channels funding the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations
International and national healthcare bodies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have been calling for years for public funds to be invested in vaccine development.
One major result of this push was the establishment of a global public-private alliance called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI).
CEPI was founded in 2017 in the aftermath of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
One of the major goals of the alliance is to support new technologies that can speed up the development of a vaccine once a new viral disease appears.
Richard Hatchett, CEPI’s chief executive officer stated “This (COVID-19) is the first new epidemic disease of note to emerge since CEPI’s founding”.
CEPI is funded by philanthropic organizations (The Wellcome Trust, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), national governments (Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, Japan, Norway, the United Kingdom) and the European Commission.
When established, the alliance set a funding target of US$1 billion, but by 2019 had only raised about $750 million of this amount.
In fact, CEPI’s annual budget for 2019 was less than 1/3 of the vaccine R&D budget for one drug company, Sanofi Pasteur.
The COVID-19 pandemic is, however, spurring increased donations to the alliance including:
- On February 5th, 2020 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a new commitment of $60 million to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, part of which will go to support their old partner CEPI in its efforts.
- In early March Germany announced a €145 million contribution to CEPI.
- On March 12th the Finnish government announced a €4 million contribution to CEPI.
- On March 17th Denmark announced a contribution of US$1.5 million to CEPI.
- In Mid-March the Canadian government announced a new contribution of US$28.2 million to CEPI.
- On March 26th, the UK government announced a US$270 million contribution to CEPI, making it the alliance’s biggest contributor. It called on all G20 countries to follow it by making substantial contributions to the efforts to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
- At the beginning of April the Norwegian government announced a US$210 million contribution to CEPI’s COVID-19 efforts.
- In early April the Belgium government announced a further €5 million contribution to CEPI.
- In mid-April the government of the Netherlands announced a US$54.5 million contribution to CEPI.
- In mid-April the Swiss government announced a US$10.3 million contribution to CEPI.
- On April 21st, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia announced a $150 million contribution to CEPI.
This sounds like a lot of money. Dr. Hatchett, however, has said that $2 billion in new funds will be required to advance just the first three COVID-19 vaccine candidates CEPI is funding to get them to the point where they are ready to file for regulatory approval in 2021. By the end of April 2020 they had only raised about half this amount.
The first three candidates CEPI agreed to provide funding for on January 23rd included programs launched by the University of Queensland, Inovio, and Moderna Therapeutics.
Moderna’s program has since received substantial funding from the US government to finish its development work and prepare manufacturing capacity. CEPI, however, has added several new programs launched by Germany’s CureVac, Novavax of the US, The University of Oxford, The University of Hong Kong, and China’s Clover Biopharmaceuticals to its funding portfolio.
Governments Directly Funding COVID-19 Vaccine Programs
National governments are also investing directly to support their own scientists and companies to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.
On Feb. 18th, 2020 the Australian government announced an A$2 million investment to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
On March 2nd, during a tour of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed the importance of developing a vaccine. At the same time he called for the setting up of a national vaccine reserve system. By early April China’s Ministry of Science and Technology had already invested US$45 million towards various scientific projects combating COVID-19 including vaccine development programs.
On March 5th, the US congress passed a US$8.3 billion emergency plan which includes $3 billion in research funds for a COVID-19 vaccine.
On March 6th, the European Commission announced €37.5 million in new funding in addition to the €10 million it had already committed to in January for COVID-19 research including vaccine development.
On March 11th, 2020 the Canadian government announced C$275 million in funding towards COVID-19 research including vaccine development.
When Will a COVID-19 Vaccine be Available
On February 11th, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a news conference that the first vaccine (for general use) could be available in 18 months.
In a meeting with pharmaceutical industry executives on March 2nd, 2020, US President Donald Trump said “I’ve heard very quick numbers, that of months. And I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that’s not a bad range.” He later pushed the executives to “Get it done. We need it. We want it fast.”
Not So Fast!
At the same meeting on March 2nd, however, Dr. Fauci pushed back against President Trump’s optimistic timeframe. Calling for more patience, Dr. Fauci said: “So he’s (President Trump) asking the question — when is it going to be deployable? And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.”
Other experts agree. CEPI’s Richard Hatchett states “It will take at least a year to come up with a vaccine for the new coronavirus. That’s even if human tests can start in 16 weeks. After that, arranging production and manufacturing of millions of doses can take another few months.”
Great Progress
Great progress has been made since January 2020 in efforts to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.
Several companies and research institutes from China, the US, the UK and Germany have developed COVID-19 vaccine candidates which have already begun human clinical trials as of May. Many more are joining the race for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Capacity for manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine is also being ramped up.