Pandemic expert urges making Covid-19 vaccines before we know they work
There is general consensus among public health experts that the only real way to get the world economy back to its feet and safe from Covid-19 is to ensure that people are vaccinated against the disease. To this end, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, has been funding work on Covid-19 vaccines since January. STAT's Helen Branswell spoke with CEPI's CEO Richard Hatchett to learn more about these efforts.
Bring us up to speed on where things stand with the work you're doing and with reaching your $2 billion funding goal.
We have eight vaccines that we're supporting at this point. We actually have a couple more that we will be announcing soon. We've got the partnership with [GlaxoSmithKline] about the use of their adjuvants, which is great. Norway is [giving] roughly $220 million. So we're actually up, I believe, to around $660 million toward the $2 billion goal.
We don't know what vaccine platform is going to work. How do you anticipate that?
I think you have to assume that a lot of platforms are going to fail because that's just our experience with vaccine development. I think ... if we want vaccines as fast as we possibly can and we don't want to compromise safety ... we're going to have to take an awful lot of financial risk. It means investing in manufacturing capacity for everything — right now — and scaling it up — right now — and even beginning full-scale manufacturing before we know if the vaccine even works. And that means a huge commitment of resources.
Read the rest of their conversation here.
Bring us up to speed on where things stand with the work you're doing and with reaching your $2 billion funding goal.
We have eight vaccines that we're supporting at this point. We actually have a couple more that we will be announcing soon. We've got the partnership with [GlaxoSmithKline] about the use of their adjuvants, which is great. Norway is [giving] roughly $220 million. So we're actually up, I believe, to around $660 million toward the $2 billion goal.
We don't know what vaccine platform is going to work. How do you anticipate that?
I think you have to assume that a lot of platforms are going to fail because that's just our experience with vaccine development. I think ... if we want vaccines as fast as we possibly can and we don't want to compromise safety ... we're going to have to take an awful lot of financial risk. It means investing in manufacturing capacity for everything — right now — and scaling it up — right now — and even beginning full-scale manufacturing before we know if the vaccine even works. And that means a huge commitment of resources.
Read the rest of their conversation here.
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