Thread by @WheatNOil

This is a great video by Dr. Napper, who is a @usask professor and headed up vaccine development at VIDO. He talks about vaccine development and how we were able to develop vaccines to COVID so fast!

One thing I didn't realize is how long it can take to find a suitable animal model for a particular virus. Like mice don't work well for COVID research. Sometimes that might take years. Because of previous research into SARS, we had a good idea of an animal model early.

Another thing I didn't realize was the extent of cooperation between different vaccine development groups. They had weekly calls at the WHO, sharing their results early. So when a good animal model was confirmed, they shared that globally instantly. Another way to fast-track.

I've had people ask me why there were 'so many' vaccines developed. Why didn't we all get together and develop ONE safe vaccine.

But part of the reason we got vaccines so early is 'because' we had literally over a hundred different vaccines in development.

Consider Merck, a big drug company with a history of vaccine development. They had two COVID vaccines in progress for a year. They cancelled them b/c they didn't work very well. Normally, they'd have to start over, hence adding to years of vaccine development.

But now, when ideas didn't quite work or hit set-backs along the way, they were just dropped or kept working on in the background while other vaccines that were going better pushed on ahead.

And all of this understates the power of funding (aka $$$). It's a lot easier to put together huge trials, put all your other projects aside, spend on research equipment, expand your team and more when money isn't a barrier.

This doesn't even get into the Phase 3 trials themselves, which went fast BECAUSE we were in the middle of an uncontrolled pandemic. It doesn't take long to show the vaccine group is effective when the placebo group gets COVID as fast as it did.

These vaccines all followed the traditional protocols. Phase 3 lasts different lengths of time depending on the medication, what you’re measuring, and (often) how long it takes to recruit enough participants. In this case, it took no time at all to recruit.

https://twitter.com/Appalatcha/status/1395767590039994378

Let’s look a different example, let’s say antidepressant medication. Let’s say you do a trial for 1000 people. You follow them up weekly for 6 weeks.

The Phase 3 trial may take 6 montbs to recruit 500 participants. But each participant only gets followed for 6 weeks.

If you were able to recruit 500 participants at once, you’d wrap up your study quickly. If you take a year to get 500 people to sign on, your study takes longer. But you don’t end up with any additional information in either case. The study design for each participant is the same

In the case of vaccines, thousands and thousands signed up early! So we didn’t have to wait for recruitment. They had money to facilitate that and follow them up. Then they had to wait and see who got COVID.

If there was very low rates of COVID, you’d have to wait a long time for enough people to get sick, to see if the vaccine was effective.

Instead, we got this:

Now, we continue to monitor for side effects and adverse events... which is what we do for every single medication approved for use ever. We finish clinical trials, we approve for use, then we keep monitoring.

I don't know why I switched from 1000 people to 500 people part way through this tweet. Hah. You get the idea though.

About Emergency Use Authorization in the US.

From here: newsminer.com/alerts/health-…