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Comment by justforfunhere | Hacker News Reader

Oxford vaccine is among the front runners. This is really good news. They plan to finish their final trials before October this year.

If all goes well, we should be looking at major relief by this year's end.

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That's unrealistically optimistic. The best case scenarios I've heard have it being deployed to healthcare workers late this year, and then hopefully be made available across the globe to approach the herd immunity threshold by the end of 2021, at least in some countries/communities. End of 2021 is an optimistic timeline to be talking about "major relief", and that's assuming no one messes with vaccine availability... Until then, we all need to take this extremely seriously and do everything we can to prevent spread.

They plan to make a million doses available by September, possibly more:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-oxford...

Is a million doses "major relief"?

Certainly not, but considering there should be 100M available by the end of the year, it seems like they are scaling up the production line considerably

That just about covers NHS employees.

A million doses is barely a whisper of a drop in the ocean.

Beyond what others have said about a million doses being a drop in the bucket, the more significant bottleneck will likely be the lack of syringes and glassware to administer the vaccine, rather than a lack of dosages.

Fauci has stated early 2021 as the goal for mass vaccination in the US if everything goes right. Provided that it works and provided that hundreds of millions of doses will be ready by EOY, and provided that the US govt. has already ordered enough of them - we can hope all the stars align. For the whole world, yes, it will take much longer than that.

"The UK could be vaccinated for Covid-19 by Christmas, says Oxford vaccine developer" https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/matt-frei/coronavirus...

>If all goes well, we should be looking at major relief by this year's end

While the news is encouraging, I think we need to pump the brakes a bit. It is very common for vaccine candidates to show promising cellular results (formation of neutralizing antibodies) and then utterly fall apart during actual efficacy testing (not actually prevent infection in people, or even actually make the infection worse when it happens). This is why most vaccines take 10-15 years to develop.

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