The news today is alight with the preliminary results that Moderna announced with respect to the virus they are trying to create against COVID-19. The markets zoomed up, and, from the comments and discussions on social media, you'd think that Moderna had just landed their first man on Mars.
In reality, in context, Moderna has demonstrated they know the direction of Mars from Earth, they have the tools to build a rocketship, and they can get the ship off the ground. They haven't demonstrated that that ship can get to Mars with people in it, or even get out of the Earth's orbit without killing the people.
In those terms, are you still breaking open the champaign?
Moderna has injected a small number of people with their putative vaccine. They demonstrated that they could raise COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies in those people at levels similar to levels seen in people who have had coronavirus. But they haven't shown the long-term effects of the vaccine, whether the vaccine is tolerated without severe side effects in the broad population, or whether the antibodies they're creating are sufficient to protect against the disease. These are not "minor" details. These are critical questions that can't yet be answered.
Look, hope is good, and all of us hope that a vaccine for COVID-19 is forthcoming.
But let's be real here: A realistic time frame to bring a vaccine to market from scratch, assuming everything goes great, is 18 months. And everything typically does not go great.
So while it's nice that the preliminary results are promising, the odds are still against a vaccine in the short term. And history is littered with vaccines and drugs that looked good in the early stages but failed for a variety of reasons.
People have been trying to develop an AIDS vaccine for more than 30 years. There still isn't one. Nor is there a cure for the virus (although we now have preventative drugs--which took far more than a decade to be discovered).
No vaccine has, ever, been successfully developed and deployed on the timescales being thrown about here. And not from want of trying.
The Moderna results are guardedly promising, but trillions of dollars have been spent on drug discovery trials that started with those words.
In reality, in context, Moderna has demonstrated they know the direction of Mars from Earth, they have the tools to build a rocketship, and they can get the ship off the ground. They haven't demonstrated that that ship can get to Mars with people in it, or even get out of the Earth's orbit without killing the people.
In those terms, are you still breaking open the champaign?
Moderna has injected a small number of people with their putative vaccine. They demonstrated that they could raise COVID-19 neutralizing antibodies in those people at levels similar to levels seen in people who have had coronavirus. But they haven't shown the long-term effects of the vaccine, whether the vaccine is tolerated without severe side effects in the broad population, or whether the antibodies they're creating are sufficient to protect against the disease. These are not "minor" details. These are critical questions that can't yet be answered.Look, hope is good, and all of us hope that a vaccine for COVID-19 is forthcoming.
But let's be real here: A realistic time frame to bring a vaccine to market from scratch, assuming everything goes great, is 18 months. And everything typically does not go great.
So while it's nice that the preliminary results are promising, the odds are still against a vaccine in the short term. And history is littered with vaccines and drugs that looked good in the early stages but failed for a variety of reasons.
People have been trying to develop an AIDS vaccine for more than 30 years. There still isn't one. Nor is there a cure for the virus (although we now have preventative drugs--which took far more than a decade to be discovered).
No vaccine has, ever, been successfully developed and deployed on the timescales being thrown about here. And not from want of trying.
The Moderna results are guardedly promising, but trillions of dollars have been spent on drug discovery trials that started with those words.
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Keep on topic!