A vaccine for COVID-19 is unlikely to be ready in 2020, according to biopharma professionals responding to the BioSpace Workplace Survey: The Impact of COVID-19 – Spring 2020. Only 25% of respondents thought a vaccine might be possible this year.
“Vaccines are not the kind of things that ought to be rushed through safety protocols,” Talli Somekh, CEO and co-founder of Erisyon, told BioSpace. “They are incredibly powerful tools for preventing the spread of illnesses like COVID-19, but it would be wildly irresponsible to deploy a sub-optimal solution that would, at best, give people a false sense of security and, at worst, cause unintended damage. Therefore, it is not likely that we will have
a vaccine available by this year.”
Typically, vaccines for new pathogens take years to develop so, while a vaccine for COVID-19 may be developed faster than normal, to expect it this year would be quite optimistic.
