Lowe ascribes the speed of vaccine development to mRNA vaccine technology. Given that adenovirus vector and inactivated virus vaccines were also developed within a year, this seems to me to be simply incorrect:
> mRNA as a vaccine technology has been worked on for some twenty to twenty-five years now, from what I can see, and (as I never tire of mentioning) we’re very fortunate that it had worked out (and quite recently) several of its outstanding problems just before this pandemic hit. Five years ago we simply could not have gone from sequence to vaccine inside of a year. And I mean that “we” to mean both “we the biopharma industry” and “we the human race”.
By far, the longest step in development was running the trials, not actual development of the candidate vaccine itself.
> mRNA as a vaccine technology has been worked on for some twenty to twenty-five years now, from what I can see, and (as I never tire of mentioning) we’re very fortunate that it had worked out (and quite recently) several of its outstanding problems just before this pandemic hit. Five years ago we simply could not have gone from sequence to vaccine inside of a year. And I mean that “we” to mean both “we the biopharma industry” and “we the human race”.
By far, the longest step in development was running the trials, not actual development of the candidate vaccine itself.