I’m sure that certain aspects of the vaccine development needed to take time regardless of resources - you need to wait to see how the vaccine works, and that takes time.
But what about the other aspects? If the governments and companies had doubled their spending - and hired more people, worked more hours in a day, had better equipment, computers etc - would that have meant that the vaccine would likely have been developed significantly earlier?
And if so, is it possible to estimate how much more money would have possibly saved additional lives had the vaccine been available weeks or months ago?
The old rule of project management is that nine men cannot have a baby in one month.
There is a critical path to the successful completion of any project that cannot be shortened no matter how much manpower or money you throw at it. I don’t have implicant knowledge of the Warp Speed project, but I am certain that project management techniques were applied and that they did the best that they could would very competent people. Risk were analyzed and contingencies were thought out. Money was not an issue, but spending extra on every conceivable contingency is a rabbit hole to avoid.
You do realize that the clinical trials started in April for the Pfizer vaccine, and the AstraZeneca/Oxford one in May?
That’s a blisteringly super-fast development as it stands. It’s been the testing requirements that have taken all the time, and even there, they’ve fast-tracked it as much as possible.
The COVID-19 genome was sequenced and made available to all by Jan 10. Pfizer had vaccine candidates ready by Jan 25, including the one that’s going into production now, I believe.
The way you test these vaccines is simple. Take two large samples of people. Split them into a vaccinated group and a placebo group using a double blind random method. Then… wait.
Based on the size of your test group, the FDA has a certain number of positive cases they want you to reach. Once enough of your test subjects have tested positive (and because of medical ethics we don’t give them COVID to check, we just let them into the environment and then wait) you check: how many of my sick test subjects were vaccinated?
If my groups were 5000 each, and I needed to wait for 100 cases to be reported, and I counted and found 48 of the sick people were vaccinated and 52 were not, my vaccine didn’t work. If I got to 100 and of those 98 were in the unvaccinated group, those are great results.
The real numbers are much higher, of course.
But the point is, until a certain portion of my test subjects get sick naturally out in the environment, my test isn’t complete. There is no way to throw money at this problem in order to fix it.
The question of human challenge studies, where you deliberately expose volunteers to a pathogen, is an important one. As you say, it’s a question of ethics, not throwing money at the problem. This is probably the most significant way in which vaccine development might have been accelerated. There’s a BMJ article here with advocates for both sides of the issue.
