Quote Originally Posted by Newish Pie View Post
The first is that when you're developing a vaccine (and especially getting funding) you can't get funding for C before you've shown results in B, and you can't get funding for B before you have results in A. Under normal circumstances that's perfectly sensible, because we don't want to waste money (either pharma's money or government research budgets distributed through the Research Councils) on things that won't work. With COVID, the nature of the emergency was such that development was done in parallel rather than sequentially - everything everywhere all at once. And that's why it was called 'warpspeed'.

The second is that a vaccine became everyone's number one priority for everyone involved. No matter what field you work in, imagine how quickly you could get X done if everyone agreed that X was the absolute top priority, that everyone should drop everything except X, and ££££ was... if not quite no object, but let's say no longer a problem. Could be a building project, could be a football transfer (see also: deadline day!), could be conveyancing on a house, could be building a house, whatever. Pick the thing in your field that needs a lot of input from a lot of people who don't all give it the highest priority and imagine how quick it could be done in an emergency.
The third is that we knew it would be useful to go after the spike (more specifically, the surface spike protein or particular bits of it - the spikes are how the coronavirus family got its name). It cut down a lot of development time knowing where to aim.

But yes, those two points are basically correct. In particular generally you'd work through the whole of Phase 1 (one or several trials), wait for results, submit them, get them approved, then start a whole Phase 2 and so on. For Covid, authorities allowed overlapping trials and so-called rolling reviews - where after enough positive evidence was on for one Phase, the next Phase could start - but always ready to be halted if further results from the Phase before contradicted initial results. And yes, the focus on this across medical researchers was immense.

Quote Originally Posted by Newish Pie View Post
Vaccine development and rollout was an extraordinary scientific and logistical achievement, which could have been even better if the Global North didn't overorder and stockpile, rather than distribute to poorer countries.
They later did distribute doses they'd stockpiled but only shortly before expiry, and it was a complete nightmare to manage.