"Compressed Timelines: the standard vaccine development cycle, including research & development (phase I to IV of clinical trials), manufacturing, approvals, licensing, distribution and deployment take several years. But the COVID-19 pandemic storm has compressed the timelines of coronavirus vaccine development to a few months... The major threat to the compressed timeline is curtailment and compromise in different steps of research and development...
Global race for vaccine: due to ever growing sense of nationalism, both the pride and profit at stake, the race and contention for first to develop a vaccine is already heated up. The raw nerves in the relationship between the different countries were exposed. This ever growing simmering global tension over the race may pose a serious threat to global peace and harmony in times to come. This race has further percolated in the pharmaceutical industries and manufacturers where they are sinking billions into a bet with a timid chance of success. If successful, they will expect hefty financial returns making affordability to the overall population questionable. To counteract this issue, some giants in the pharmaceutical industry have promised to make vaccines available at low cost at first and they may reap up the cost if vaccines are needed for seasonal use and for stocking up by any nation in future ...
Vaccine vs drugs: while the vaccines take time for thorough testing, the potential drug development is making incremental advances and has jumped into the COVID vaccine race. Some of these drugs are targeted towards stopping the viral replication, while some are helping to calm the exaggerated immune response and organ damage. The advantage of drugs over vaccines is that results are seen quickly as they are tested in already sick patients, unlike the vaccines, wherein researchers have to monitor the infection potential. The vaccine needs to be extremely safe as it is given in healthy subjects compared to drugs, which may have acceptable risk in already sick patients. The repurposing of drugs can be another effective way to make COVID-19 less fatal and/or morbid."
©Prathamesh Haridas Kamble et al. Pan African Medical Journal (ISSN: 1937-8688). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.