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David Mitchell
I am simply not convinced that these Covid vaccines needed to take 5 years.
The reason previous vaccines have taken longer is simply the they adhered to slower work processes and procedures. It's my understanding that the widespread Covid panic drove us to use more of a "hurry up offfense". Chemists and lab workers did not work normal "office hours" as in prior testing. Many worked round the clock in the labs, speeding up parts of the process where they could - though not shotening the times for the actual chemical processes and reactions to occur. A second (and perhaps bigger) reason is the normal slow-as-mollasses paperwork part of the equation was reduced dramatically by simply shortening some of the human steps and continuing to keep at it on weekends.
And I seem to recall reports that many extra workers were pulled away from less important projects and added to staff Covid research. There is really an awfull lot of delay and buerocratic time wasted in many of these proceedures under "normall" circumstances.
You would not beleive some stories I heard from my Dad as he and my Uncle Ralph Cole (retired after a life long carreer as the very first employee of Ross Labratories) were developing asthma and allergy medicines in a small private lab that they had formed (Allergy Labs of Ohio Inc. - with a small operation in an old building down near the farigroudns) about the slow-poke pace of bureaucracy involved in similar matters.
It took years for them to achieve several approvals for medications for Allergies and Asthma. One bockbuster product for asthma patients was run through two whole cycles of testing ( 2 or 3 years) with perfect tests results each time, only to be denied approval because the test results were marked in a way that one of the FDA board members disliked the way they marked them on the lab test sheets. To begin with, they waited forever to get their tests submitted and accepted for review. Finally, the panel of 11 scientists and doctors all approved, but the one dissenting head of the committee had the power to overrule all of them. He happend to be a physican who had never parcticed medicine a day in his life, and who we later learned held stock in a competing pharmacutical company. (If memory serves, it was Mylan Labs)
Another medication that they produced was one to ward of poison ivy reactions, and it had terriffic results. It was scuttled in it's testing stages because the sample they were using for trials was the workers for Ohio State Highway Department - mostly the field workers who cleared the brush and weeds prior to road construction. The capsule was so effective that the workers began to complain that they were not getting enough sick days off. Their union raised such a stink that OSHA stopped the company from gaining approval for the product.
Note: A larger, and very innovative new drug company came along and planned to buy out the company - pending the successful testing and approval of a revolutionary bronchial dilator medicine they had come up with. The tests were being produced in our lab, with the promise that they would buy out the lab for a fortune once the drug was approved. The FDA refused the approval (twice) for some convoluted reasons after a couple of years of testing. My cousins and sisters and I were all stockholders. We got a nice piece of change at the outset, but the eventual buyout would have made us all stinking rich.
Asa S la vida!
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She invited me to coffee that afternoon (they lived in the same apt complex). Bernardo and I didn't recognize each other but it turned out that he had been roommates at OSU with Carlos Wehby (Elena's former husband). Elena later informed me that Bernardo and I had met at the same Spanish Club party on campus where she and Carlos first met. I guess we weren't too impressed with each other then but I was very happy to have him as a neighbor in Valencia. Through them we met a wonderful group of Americans who like Bernardo were studying medicine at the U of Valencia. Some of them remain dear friends 51 years later. Go Buckeyes!