I am not willing to risk my health on a rushed vaccine that bypasses the usual protocols of development. Vaccines can take years not a few months to get right. We have treatments that can work. Is the trade off in potential side effects and probable deaths worth it?
I would agree with you that nobody should risk their health on a rushed vaccine that bypasses the usual protocols for development and testing.
But that isn’t happening here. All the vaccine candidates have to go through the exact same phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3 clinical trials that every other vaccine has to go through. That’s where Moderna’s vaccine candidate and Oxford’s (along with a few others) stand right now. They’ve made it through phase 1 and phase 2 clinical trials without serious side effects and with evidence for efficacy.
Phase 1 trials give the vaccine candidate to up to about 100 volunteers who are then monitored just to make sure there are no serious side effects. Efficacy isn’t really a priority here; you’re just making sure you aren’t going to kill anyone with this. Once it’s confirmed nothing serious goes wrong in humans, phase 2 moves on to around 500-1,000 volunteers who are monitored to check for both side effects and efficacy, but still primarily for safety concerns. Once that’s complete, phase 3 gives the vaccine candidate to a much larger audience (thousands to tens of thousands of people). In this phase, both safety and efficacy are heavily scrutinized.
How are these vaccine candidates moving so quickly? President Trump. He’s fast-tracked the top candidates and forced the FDA’s do-nothing bureaucrats to get out of the way and not sit on approval applications for months on end. He’s streamlined the process so the manufacturers can keep moving forward. And he’s made major financial commitments (billions of taxpayer dollars) so they’ll manufacture their vaccines in parallel with phase 3 clinical trials so that if they pass all the safety and efficacy tests, they’ll be immediately available to the public. Nobody has EVER done that before. That’s why this is so fast.
We should all be THANKING President Trump rather than dumping on his work.