I am slightly suspicious about how so many of these vaccines from a variety of companies have met approval so rapidly.
I'm certainty not an anti vaxxer.
SHUMBA
There is no reason to be suspicious - if you investigate a little you'll find the answers.
Economy:
Vaccine manufacturers got the money up front. They have been given huge capital injections so that they could be finished as soon as possible.
Less bureaucracy:
Before a vaccine can be used, there are piles of documentation that must be reviewed by the drug authorities.
The vaccines must be thoroughly tested in several phases, first on cells in the laboratory, then in animals and then on humans in three large trials.
Before a trial can begin, the vaccine manufacturer must send a description of the trial to the authorities, who will determine whether the trial design is in order and whether it is safe to test the vaccine.
Once the trial is complete, the manufacturer must again submit documentation to obtain the permission of the authorities to proceed to the next trial phase and so on.
The procedure is cumbersome and usually it can take years to get the necessary permits.
During the corona pandemic, the process has accelerated markedly.
The whole regulatory system has been ready to give the vaccines first priority. They have set aside resources to deal with it quickly because it is an emergency.
The European Medicines Agency EMA introduced a system where they reviewed the documentation ongoing while the trials were going on.
In this way, the vaccine manufacturers have been able to go directly from one experimental phase to the next - several have even been given the green light to run the last two experimental phases at the same time.
Normally, the experimental phases are sharply separated, and it can take months to get permission to move on between the different phases.
Prevalence of the disease:
Before knowing if a vaccine works, it must be tested on tens of thousands of people who are given either the active substance or placebo.
Once a sufficient number of the volunteers have been infected with the virus they have been vaccinated against, the researchers examine whether the vaccine works by comparing the number of infected in the two groups.
The more prevalent a virus is, the easier it is to test a vaccine because the faster the number of infections needed to measure an effect is reached.
The last experimental phase usually takes a very long time, because you have to deal with a large number of infected people to be able to judge the effect.
The rarer a disease is, the longer it takes to complete the experiment. The coronavirus was wide spread early on, so you could say that the manufacturers have had favorable conditions for testing the vaccines.
Knowledge:
Researchers have previously worked to develop vaccines against another coronavirus, SARS-CoV-1, which broke out in China in 2002.
Unlike the current coronavirus, the first one disappeared by itself before spreading globally. Therefore, the work of developing vaccines stopped before testing them on humans.
It was no longer possible to raise money to research it. However, some researchers continued to work on examining, in particular, the protein that resides on the surface of coronaviruses.
The vaccine projects from 2002-2003 have not been wasted, because when researchers last year started developing vaccines against the new coronavirus, they did not start from scratch.
From the first virus, a basic knowledge has been obtained, including which area of the virus it would be good to vaccinate against.
This meant that it was possible to start developing a vaccine faster when the new coronavirus broke out in 2019. The vaccine manufacturers had the advantage that there was knowledge to build on.
The producers knew, for example, from 2002 that it is a good idea to make corona vaccines based on the spike proteins that sit like spikes on the virus' surface.
In 2002 - 2003 it was found that the most crucial is the spike protein that coronaviruses use to penetrate the body's cells.
It gave a head start when they started developing vaccines against the new coronavirus. One of the reasons why it has been possible to develop the vaccines so quickly is that it has been possible to reuse knowledge about coronaviruses from the previous outbreak.
Technology:
The first vaccines to come into use was made with technologies that have been under development since the 1990s.
The vaccines do not consist of attenuated or live viruses. Instead, they contain an artificially produced part of the coronavirus' genetic material called mRNA.
In addition, a number of other new and more traditional technologies are in play among the many companies that are currently developing coronavirus vaccines.
In recent years, the development of new vaccine technologies has accelerated.
Biotechnologically we have come an extremely long way in the last 10 years. Technologies have been developed so that the vaccines can be made better and manufactured more quickly.
So there are a number of good reasons why the corona vaccines have come on the scene in record time.
Although the approval procedures have been speeded up, the vaccines are tested as thoroughly as usual before they are approved, and the requirements for documentation of efficacy and safety have not been changed.