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Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

There's a huge international effort to develop a vaccine or a suppressant, etc.

The US doesn't have even close to the necessary number of testing kits or infrastructure to test 300 million people. They're working on ramping up production and availability of tests.

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There is a reason vaccines take a long time to approve - if you are getting the general population vaccinated, you want to make sure the side effects a year down the road don't negate the benefit (if any, vaccines are not 100% effective)

There is no working vaccine. Multiple candidates will take a year and a half if everything works perfectly. It's possible that a vaccine will not be found.

They already have a corona virus vaccine for many live stock animals so at least that is promising

Historically, a reasonably safe vaccine has taken many years to develop. Rushing a vaccine through the system so it only takes months? Yeah, I not going to stand in line to get vaccinated.

There are promising treatments though, and these should show results within weeks or months.

Failure is a result that can be displayed, number of candidate treatments isn't a real metric for making predictions.

I think I don't fully understand what you are saying, but there have been preliminary trials suggesting that some of these candidate treatments are helpful in treating the disease.

even just vaccinating the people in the high risk groups would be a huge win. and those people are much more likely to get in line.

Historically, we've never seen the world's top researchers, governments, and pharmaceutical companies all racing to come up with a vaccine and treatment at once while sharing data at unprecedented scale.

I understand allowing reasonable time to complete trials, but let's not act like this is just a routine drug approval.

There are already vaccine trials underway, the 12-18 months is the minimum amount of time we allow for making sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. We're basically talking about giving this vaccine to every at-risk person in the world. If it's not safe, that would be a really bad outcome.

The unprecedented scale will allow more parallel efforts, to the point that the odds of a viable vaccine being available next year are much greater, but it won't speed up the minimum time.

My comment didn’t suggest otherwise. I was referring to both treatments and vaccines.

The vaccine candidate didn't take very long, because researchers were able to re-use the initial work done for making a SARS vaccine. But it will still take 12-18 months to test the vaccine candidates.

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