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It is true that vaccines have in the past taken a long, long time to develop. Until 2020, a new vaccine usually took at least ten years to develop from concept to roll-out. Many took much longer. The malaria vaccine programme at the Jenner Institute has been going for twenty-five years, and research into malaria vaccines had been going on for more than a hundred years – so far, with limited success. The lab-to-jab record-holder was the mumps vaccine, developed in four years by Maurice Hilleman in the United States in the 1960s.1 But the standard lengthy timeline we were all used to was never because vaccine development required ten, fifteen or thirty years of continuous painstaking lab work, clinical trials and data analysis. For every vaccine that had ever been developed up until 2020, most of the elapsed development time was spent waiting. In 2020, there were three key factors that enabled us to cut out the waiting and crunch ten years into one: first, the work we had already done; second, changes to the way funding was given out; and third, doing in parallel things that we would normally do in sequence.
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