Vaccines may arrive in record time, but the virus has been faster
Scientists have created candidate vaccines, which eventually could protect billions of people from COVID-19, with astonishing speed, compressing scientific efforts that usually take years into months. But the leader of a key drug trial said Tuesday that the blistering research pace has nonetheless been too slow to catch the coronavirus. “We are now five months into it, and a large-scale phase 3 trial launched yesterday, which is remarkable,” said Lindsey Baden, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS). He also is a principal investigator of the first U.S. vaccine to enter such trials, some of which will happen at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “It is fast, but we need to be as fast as this virus is. … With four million infections, 150,000 deaths in this country alone, we have to move faster.” Baden is a principal investigator for the Brigham’s trial of a messenger RNA-based vaccine, whose promising...