Both Gavi and the Gates Foundation are intended to create "healthy markets" for vaccines. Gates didn't design Windows 95 either; he was a business and marketing guy promoting it. It's not the development that's the issue, it's the fact that these alliances are profit motivated and vaccines have been a loosing bet for years due to the incredibly amount of research funding needed to bring one to market.
Their motives for rushing a vaccine to market right now are not altruistic. They want to prove they can bring vaccines for novel viruses to the market quickly. It could work, but it could also be a disaster. The fact that this is an 'emergency' allows them to avoid a lot of regulations, and even liability if the trials end up making people sick or killing them.
Yeah, good last resort, not first.
Sure, the Oxford vaccine uses an adenovirus that is not present in humans outside Africa, but when they try to make a second vaccine, based on the same adenovirus, people who took the COVID-19 vaccine might not be protected.
So while not tested, mRNA might be a much better bet for the future, because we will be able to develop vaccines much faster and not have to search for a new virus vector each time a new vaccine is developed.
It looks like the side effects from mRNA vaccines are bigger than a typical vaccination. It's starting to look like mRNA vaccines may not be the vaccine you'd want in the long term based on this alone. The question is, do they create high severity side effects that preclude using them in the short term? We're about to learn...
There's a lot of other efforts; adenovirus vectors, attenuated efforts, non-replicating virus efforts. Of course, the adenovirus vectors are of concern because if immunity wears off, you can't necessarily give someone a booster a couple years later.
I'd say that there's a 70% chance that there's millions of doses available for North America by late January of a >50% efficacy vaccine with a high production rate from that point.
There are so many different vaccine efforts now, and so many of them producing at risk. Some will work. It's just a question of how high the efficacy is and the duration of protection.
> ..and Immune Enhancement Syndrome one of the serious consequences of the SARS1 and MERS vaccines that never made it past their trials.
A lot of us were worried about antibody dependent enhancement. But we've had basically no evidence that this is a significant concern: successful treatment with convalescent plasma, successful challenge tests with vaccines in animal models, successful monoclonal antibody therapies in animal tests, etc, all point the other way.
> Sure millions of people got the vaccine and were fine, but 3,000 people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome.
And this wasn't a good trade, because the vaccine probably saved a lot fewer than 3,000 lives. But at this point, you'd save a whole lot of lives even with a vaccine that bad. (And we're not going quite that quick that time around and we have somewhat better tools to prevent bad outcomes).
> I do not understand why we're trusting the man who gave us Windows 95 to lead the Gates/Gavi alliance responsible for giving us a "safe" vaccine in less than a year.
??? Now you've gone completely off the rails. Gavi's primary role is as a purchaser of vaccines and not in development. The couple dozen vaccine development efforts worldwide are what we can expect to yield a vaccine.