How fast can a vaccine be made

Another bottleneck is equipment and raw material availability. Once you find a device that works you cannot really go to your local grocery store to get one. The same is true for the basic raw materials and supplies — both need time to react to the larger demand. TA: How much vaccine manufacturing takes place in the U.

Do we rely on importing vaccines, or do we have the capacity to make our own? Pancorbo: Not much vaccine manufacturing takes place in the U. Traditionally, vaccines were manufactured in other places around the world. After the flu pandemic our government put a considerable investment into increasing vaccine manufacturing in the U. TA: How long do you think it will take manufacturers to make enough vaccine to reach everyone who can be vaccinated?

Pancorbo: I would think it will take until late or mid to see a significant amount of the population vaccinated. Pancorbo: Yes. The approval process followed by FDA is very thorough and trustworthy. And, particularly for COVID, a lot of information about the vaccine candidates has been made public from early on, which gives me an additional confidence in the process. Very well written and organized and answered my questions about the time typically needed to actually manufacture a batch of Covid vaccine.

Thank you very much. December 16, Matt Shipman. If you have already signed into ted. Your name and responses will be shared with TED Ed. Here's how. Want a daily email of lesson plans that span all subjects and age groups?

Learn more. How fast can a vaccine be made? When a new pathogen emerges, our bodies and healthcare systems are left vulnerable. So how quickly can we develop vaccines when we need them most? Vaccine development is normally a long and expensive process because of delays caused by applying for funding, ethical approval, recruiting volunteers, negotiating with manufacturers and scaling up production.

In the emergency state of the COVID pandemic the scientists, doctors, ethics approval boards, manufacturers and regulatory agencies have all come together to work harder and faster. Download this infographic PDF. Download this infographic JPEG for use on social media. Unprecedented collaboration To work at speed has meant carrying out different stages of development and production at the same time, to get to a vaccine faster.

Creation of additional manufacturing capability To meet the demand for the billions of doses of Covid vaccines in addition to all the other routine vaccines that still need to be manufactured, such as MMR and polio requires various steps to be taken: manufacturing was started before the Covid vaccines were proven to be safe and effective. This was done to avoid delay when a vaccine was approved, but at a risk to the vaccine manufacturers.

This is because many existing sites are still needed to produce routine immunisations which must be kept up where possible to limit the burden of additional outbreaks.

Also, new sites were needed to manufacture some of the novel vaccine technologies that are being tried for Covid , which have not been produced at scale before.

This could include vaccines that only require one dose. We will stockpile new vaccines, ready for trials and emergency authorisation for future outbreaks, beyond this pandemic. This explainer was originally published in April and updated in January Related content. Explainer Safety first: how Covid vaccines are tested 2 February Covid vaccines: information hub. Sign up to our newsletter Get the latest news about Wellcome and the work we fund in a monthly email.

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