We can’t skip steps on the road to a COVID-19 vaccine
Photo by Blake Nissen for The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The pharmaceutical company Moderna started the last, longest step in the process of testing its COVID-19 vaccine candidate at the end of July — a Phase 3 clinical trial. It’s an enormous undertaking: their goal is to recruit 30,000 people, inject some of them with an experimental vaccine and then follow each and every one of them to see how many contract the coronavirus and how many do not. This will take months, even with the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed compressing the timeline whenever possible. Those months may seem endless when over a thousand people are dying from COVID-19 each day in the United States.
The process is long and intensive for a reason, though. Just because a vaccine exists doesn’t mean it’s reasonable...