SCIENCE: Pfizer, BioNTech: COVID-19 vaccine on track for review in October.
Related, some thoughts from a friend on Facebook:
Nearly absent from the general COVID discussion is Operation Warp Speed, a stupendously expensive all-out USG effort to create, mass manufacture, and distribute a working vaccine for the disease in under one year. To term it a Manhattan-Project level effort is for once not overstatement: the envisaged timeframe is historically short, and there has never before been a successful vaccine for this sort of virus. The effort alone is crazy, and here’s the really crazy part: it looks like it’s going to work. There are a sufficient number of promising vaccines now in the pipeline that it is overwhelmingly probable at least one of them will make it to full deployment.
Set aside what it means that the United States can beat the world in medicine but not in public health — that’s going to occupy observers for years to come, and in fields well beyond this one. A working COVID vaccine probably doesn’t mean eradication of the disease, barring global herd immunity as a consequence of global mass adoption that isn’t likely. It does mean reduction of COVID to something like Legionnaire’s disease: a deeply serious, endemic, and niche illness that no longer shapes daily life and macroeconomics. It doesn’t matter what your political convictions are, that’s good news.
Right?
But what if we’re only sixty days out from Operation Warp Speed success? What if the announcement of a working vaccine comes on October 21st, and the machinery for its production and rollout starts up on October 22nd? What if the light at the end of the tunnel becomes visible just as the fall colors hit their peak in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin?
It should be good news for all mankind, of course. But guess how it will be covered and received. Just guess. Think about it now.
I expect that a lot of people currently saying “wait until there’s a vaccine” will be saying “not this vaccine.” Of course, my prediction is that — even if this is the timetable — by the time a vaccine is widely available the pandemic will be largely over.