| I think we're seeing heroics in moving forward here. Obviously, you're right, and the reason we talk about going from 10 to 15 years down to something like 18 months is about squeezing those steps as much as possible. The regulators in the Ebola experience were really fabulous. They worked with us and tried to keep any bureaucratic delays down to the smallest amount possible. And I think that's what's going to be important here, is we have to look at every single step and say, "Is it critical?" But you do need to answer a lot of these questions. For example, if you have a vaccine that works in healthy people, it very well may not give an immune response to the elderly. We may need to change that vaccine to make it work there. It may not work in young children. So you need a certain amount of studies done. Of course, if you work in areas that have big outbreaks, you're able to also enroll more quickly and follow people more quickly. That's one of the reasons we'll have to think about this globally, because we don't know in 12 to 18 months, or even six to 18 months, if we're really lucky, where the epidemic will be raging and where we want to do the clinical trials. We should be prepared to do them wherever in the world it's possible, and also do some in different types of countries. Developing countries may have different immune responses than in wealthy countries. |
