Why a Vaccine for COVID-19 is Taking Time: It’s Not Politics

You can’t rush certain things. Producing a vaccine is one of those things. Generating a vaccine for the Coronavirus will take as long as it takes. It does not matter how many companies are working on it or how much money we spend.

A good analogy is pregnancy. If one woman gets pregnant, it takes nine months to get a baby. If three women get pregnant, it will not get you a baby in three months. No matter how many women get pregnant, you can’t speed the process up; it takes nine months to gestate a fetus.

The approach to multiple companies trying to produce a virus cannot speed up the process because, like pregnancy, vaccine production relies on biological processes. It takes time to grow a vaccine. Time for the immune system to respond to the vaccine. And even more time to find out if it is safe and effective. Each company working on an immunization faces the same biological restrictions, just like every pregnant woman is looking at the same nine months of pregnancy.

The rationale for having multiple companies work on the vaccine is to ensure that we get a success. It is sad, but not every pregnancy leads to a healthy child. If multiple women are pregnant, the odds of getting at least one healthy child improves. If numerous companies are working on vaccines, the odds that one will be…