Well, in general developing a new treatment for a new disease from scratch takes a decade or more. The HIV virus was identified in 1983, but effective treatments weren't available until 1997. People expected there would be a vaccine for HIV before the 1980s were over, but HIV has proven remarkably resistant to vaccination efforts.
So a vaccine would be the faster way out of this mess, if we can generate a safe and effective one.
There's been a lot of hope that a pre-existing drug would turn out to be effective against COVID-19, but so far only a few drugs are helpful at all and they aren't increasing survival by 100%, more like increasing survival by 1/3?
At this point I'm hoping one of the several vaccine candidates in Stage III trials will turn out to be safe and effective, and then it will just be a matter of manufacturing and distributing enough doses to everybody by the end of next year.
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Date: 12 September 2020 03:15 pm (UTC)So a vaccine would be the faster way out of this mess, if we can generate a safe and effective one.
There's been a lot of hope that a pre-existing drug would turn out to be effective against COVID-19, but so far only a few drugs are helpful at all and they aren't increasing survival by 100%, more like increasing survival by 1/3?
At this point I'm hoping one of the several vaccine candidates in Stage III trials will turn out to be safe and effective, and then it will just be a matter of manufacturing and distributing enough doses to everybody by the end of next year.