From NBC News - 20/20 hindsight!!
HOUSTON — Dr. Peter Hotez says he made the pitch to anyone who would listen. After years of research, his team of scientists in Texas had helped develop a vaccine to protect against a deadly strain of coronavirus. Now they needed money to begin testing it in humans.
But this was 2016. More than a decade had passed since the viral disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, had spread through China, killing more than 770 people. That disease, an earlier coronavirus similar to the one now sweeping the globe, was a distant memory by the time Hotez and his team sought funding to test whether their vaccine would work in humans.
"We tried like heck to see if we could get investors or grants to move this into the clinic," said Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "But we just could not generate much interest."
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-new...ret-stockpile-of-medical-supplies-80026693725
That was a big missed opportunity, according to Hotez and other vaccine scientists, who argue that SARS, and the Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, of 2012, should have triggered major federal and global investments to develop vaccines in anticipation of future epidemics.
Instead, the SARS vaccine that Hotez's team created in collaboration with scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is sitting in a freezer, no closer to commercial production than it was four years ago.
"We could have had this ready to go and been testing the vaccine's efficacy at the start of this new outbreak in China," said Hotez, who believes the vaccine could provide cross-protection against the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory disease known as COVID-19. "There is a problem with the ecosystem in vaccine development, and we've got to fix this."
Hotez took that message to Congress on Thursday while
testifying before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He argued that the new coronavirus should trigger changes in the way the government funds vaccine development.
"It's tragic that we won't have a vaccine ready for this epidemic," Hotez wrote in prepared remarks. "Practically speaking, we'll be fighting these outbreaks with one hand tied behind our backs."
As of Friday, there had been
more than 100,000 confirmed coronavirus cases globally and at least 3,338 deaths. Public health officials are concerned that the virus, which can lead to respiratory failure brought on by pneumonia, will spread widely in the U.S. and last beyond this year — much like the seasonal flu, but more severe and potentially deadlier.
In response, pharmaceutical companies, university researchers and the federal government have been rushing to develop a vaccine. In addition to the official government effort led by the National Institutes of Health,
several drugmakers are also scrambling to develop a vaccine that can be tested in humans in the coming months. But even under the rosiest of projections, one won't be ready for more than a year, government officials say.
"I'm cautiously optimistic that we will get a vaccine," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institutes of Health's director for infectious diseases, said
in an interview this week. "The thing that's sobering is that it's not a vaccine we're going to have next month, so we're going to have to tough it out through this evolution."