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Well, it's an interesting question you ask there. So first of all, China was heroic on this. They did post the genetic sequence of it. Today, we have companies that can sit down with a computer and from that genetic sequence, make what is a candidate vaccine. Now, a candidate vaccine obviously means it's not a licensed product. It's something that somebody wants to work on. But you're right, you have to have the right nomenclature, because "candidate" can mean I'm working on something, it's in my head, I'm just doing a little work on it, I've got something in a vial, I'm beginning to do testing on it. And so what we saw in that case was a company called Moderna. That was the first vaccine that went into humans. It's a messenger RNA-based system. I actually visited the company, not in this outbreak but before, because the technology is interesting. And what they were able to do was, in 42 days, make a candidate vaccine from the genetic sequence. They didn't need the organism. That now is in clinical testing. Now, there is no licensed mRNA vaccine, so we're going to have to figure out, is it safe? Does it work in different age groups? How are we going to scale it up? All of that. But there are many others who are using conventional vaccinology. An example would be, the French are working on a measles-based vaccine. The idea is to put the spiked protein in the measles vector, and it takes a little bit longer to do that work, but once you have that done, of course, we know how to make measles vaccine. We make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions of doses and provide it to the whole world. If that was to work, that might be easier to scale up. |
