“Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (N.I.A.I.D.), spoke up. “A vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that’s deployable,” he said. The earliest it would be deployable, Fauci added, is “in a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.”
I freely admit I'm no virologist, but I don't quite get the focus on vaccines over cures.
People are panicking because there's no cure and they think there's a small but negligible chance they might die if they get it.
The virus is structurally quite simple. There are antibodies known from the previous SARS epidemic that are predicted via simulation to bind to the spike proteins very well indeed. I did some research over the past few days into how quickly you can make antibody serums and, well, it's a lot faster than you can make vaccines, especially if you aren't trying to manufacture huge quantities. At least one biotech firm claims to be right on the cusp of manufacturing antigens, which are a key ingredient in the (mass) production of antibodies.
Very few people get COVID-19 so badly they'd need to be given an external cure. With the containment efforts, it's possible you don't need huge factories producing antibodies to be able to cure the worst affected cases, and it's possible that the news of availability of a cure would itself be sufficient to largely end the panic. If COVID-19 becomes just "a bad flu that can be cured at your local hospital in the unlikely case it gets worse" then we might see a reset to normalcy very fast.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-long-will-it-ta...