How Long Do Vaccines Take To Make? | Unveiled

How Long Do Vaccines Take to Make?

Diseases pose a deadly threat to every species on the planet, and many of our most common illnesses are things we’ve been living with for thousands of years. But, in the last few centuries, advances in medicine have given us a fighting chance against them... and vaccinations are some of our best weapons.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; how long do vaccines take to make?

The first widely used vaccine in human history was against smallpox, a widespread and dangerous disease that killed millions around the world. Early evidence of the infection’s distinctive lesions has been found on the skin of Egyptian mummies dating from the twelfth century BC, but it’s possible that smallpox was around long before even then - perhaps as far back as the year ten thousand BC. For the eventual vaccine, which the British doctor Edward Jenner famously developed in 1796, biological material was first taken from the pustules of someone infected with cowpox - a similar but significantly milder condition. Someone else who wasn’t previously infected was then exposed to that biological material, meaning that they were, in effect, deliberately imbued with the disease. The thinking was that the antibodies which their bodies generated to fight against the survivable cowpox would then immunize them against the far more dangerous smallpox. And, for the most part, it worked(!), and a standardised shot came shortly afterwards.

Suffice to say, though, the world’s first vaccine had come years, decades and even centuries too late for millions of smallpox victims. And, considering that Jenner’s work had been built on that of those before him, and that the first inklings on how vaccination might work can arguably be traced as far back as variolation methods practiced in medieval China - the smallpox shot had been a long time coming! It had taken hundreds of years, peppered with hundreds of outbreaks, before a solution was found.

After Jenner, though, vaccinology gradually spread around the world. At first, the smallpox vaccine was only widely used in Europe and America. It arrived elsewhere, though, in the twentieth century, when there was a more global effort to administer and regulate the jab - with the World Health Organization being established in 1948. Since then, the W.H.O. has fronted various eradication campaigns, with different degrees of success. The eradication of smallpox, which was finally announced in 1979, represented an enormous victory for public health. Meanwhile, there’s an ongoing effort against polio… and, while it hasn’t been completely eliminated, there has been a reported 99.95% reduction in cases. Other diseases currently targeted by the W.H.O. for eradication are measles, mumps, and rubella. Importantly, this doesn’t mean that we’re working on developing vaccines for these ailments; it means that safe and effective vaccines do already exist, we’re now just trying to deploy them far and wide enough so that the diseases they target will be gone for good within the next few decades.

While we’ve clearly come a long way since Edward Jenner’s day, however, vaccinology seemingly hasn’t changed all that much in the last one hundred years. We have been able to develop vaccines against all sorts of diseases - with one doctor, the American Maurice Hilleman, credited with developing eight throughout the twentieth century for meningitis, chickenpox, and pneumonia to name a few. But they all work on the same basic principle; they use weak or inactive strains of the virus we want to immunize against to create antibodies, so that when the actual virus is eventually encountered, we’re far better equipped to fight it off.

But there are other, less “traditional” methods in development, too… including using genetic material to make vaccines from DNA and RNA. It’s hoped that a vaccine like this would be able to create the antibodies without needing to introduce the virus (or a version of the virus) itself, making it safer in theory, and meaning that those getting vaccinated won’t wind up feeling even a little unwell thanks to the shot (which sometimes happens). So far, no vaccine like this has been approved by the authorities, but there’s belief in some virology circles that that could soon change.

Still, it’s no bad thing that vaccines are so regulated, because they really can be the difference between life and death; getting them wrong can prove fatal. Any new vaccine must pass countless tests before it’s rolled out for public use, which is part of the reason why they can take so long to be developed. The existing vaccines we already have in the world are already deemed incredibly safe. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, your chances of suffering a severe allergic reaction to a vaccine are one in a million. For contrast, you have a one in five hundred chance of dying if you contract measles and aren’t vaccinated. It is still true, though, that vaccination isn’t advised for some people - including young babies, anyone who’s pregnant, or anyone with a weaker immune system. And that’s why herd immunity is so important; the idea being that with wide enough vaccine coverage, those most at risk who can’t be immunized are still protected.

While the heavy regulation of vaccines is undoubtedly a good thing and necessary for safety, however, the inevitable delays can be the exact opposite of what you want in a crisis. Under usual circumstances, it can take as long as fifteen to twenty years to develop and implement a vaccine, because of all the clinical trials that it has to pass. In the case of a global pandemic that could quickly claim millions of lives, then, this is a major problem. On the one hand we need a vaccine quickly; on the other it’s impossible to cut corners.

Flu vaccines seem, perhaps, a little easier to come by, but the reason we can mobilize to get them out so quickly during any particular flu pandemic is because we already have vaccines against many different strains of influenza - including the deadliest, the H1N1 strain responsible for the outbreaks of Spanish flu in 1918 and swine flu in 2009. Annually, the most common types of flu are identified by health officials, and put into that year’s vaccine - which then provides immunity for around six months. The effectiveness of that vaccine does also depend upon how many people take it (with everyone who’s able to take it encouraged to do so), but we are at least prepared to some degree every time flu season comes around.

In the case of the Covid-19 outbreak, however, we don’t have a single vaccine to work from. The previous two major coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS, were contained quite quickly so, while work did begin on vaccines, it was eventually stopped. Perhaps if we had completed a vaccine for SARS (which is caused by a virus said to be genetically similar to the one causing Covid-19), then we may have had a better chance at quickly bringing out another one in 2020. Nevertheless, the work that was done in the fight against SARS is helping scientists that are working on a solution now. Yes, they’re having to start from the beginning, but we have at least seen viruses of this type before. Still, there doesn’t appear to be a “quick fix” here… and, as of early 2020, it’s estimated that it will take between twelve and eighteen months to get a safe, tested vaccine into the global market. And even that timeline is thought by some to be optimistic. If a Covid-19 vaccine were made that quickly, then it’d represent an unprecedented achievement in medicine.

And, once the vaccine is launched, there is another, perhaps even greater obstacle to overcome - distribution. Vaccines cost money, and so their availability can become as much an economic matter as a medical necessity. There’s no telling how a Covid-19 shot will be managed but, with the virus thought to be present in almost every country on the planet, there’s a long line of nations awaiting its release. And who gets to the front of that queue? Even were the vaccine to be fairly spread regardless of wealth, it remains to be seen how evenly it’s administered by national governments - with concerns already mounting that it could only be available to those who can afford it. Right now, the most expensive vaccine on the market according to the CDC is for HPV, at $227 per dose in 2020. Only time will tell what the price tag on a coronavirus shot will be… or how quickly such an important medical breakthrough will reach everywhere on Earth. But, it’s only then, when the majority of the global population becomes immune to the virus, that we can truly say we’ve beaten it.

Depending on factors like research and manufacturing cost, the logistics of mass distribution and just the plain difficulty of learning how to immunize against a new pathogen in the first place, a vaccine can take anywhere from months to decades just to be developed. For Covid-19, it’s still far too early to say with any certainty - but even the most hopeful of scientific predictions concede that we’re unlikely to have a vaccine against it for at least the first year of the outbreak. Until then, our best way forward is to try to slow the spread and stay safe.