Don Quixote

There's much talk of how long it'll take to have a Covid-19 vaccine. The standard answer has been 12 to 18 months. But a couple of facts float through the ether without landing together in the various news feeds often enough. Well, or at all in my consumption.

First:

There are yet to be vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat human coronavirus infections.

And, second:

There is no vaccine yet for the virus; and because it's different than the influenza virus, traditional methods like using eggs won't work. As scientists race to find a cure, the huge US stockpile of eggs won't be of any help.

The first fact is kind of obvious, in that if there were a vaccine for a coronavirus class virus (people need to remember coronavirus is the name of a class of viruses, not the name a virus), that would be the common cold. Influenza virus is another class of virus. And so on. They all behave differently, and it's clear from the fact that the cold virus is just a nuisance, so no one (it seems) has made the effort to develop a vaccine. The other members of the coronavirus class aren't so benign.

The second fact isn't obvious to civilians, of course, but has at least as large an impact of getting these United States protected. There's a mammoth vaccine infrastructure, just around the egg supply, as you can see from the CNN report. The plant and equipment for non-egg production isn't even known yet. More to the point, near as I can find, no mRNA or DNA vaccine has been developed and approved for any indication. It's a 'Star Trek' mission, "to go where no man has gone before".

The candidates for a coronavirus vaccine are based on messenger-RNA (aka, mRNA) or DNA. But, of course no one knows whether these vaccines are the answer.

There are no approved mRNA or DNA vaccines, and neither has ever been tested in a large-scale clinical trial for an infectious disease. "The COVID crisis is a great opportunity for those technologies to be pushed."

Warp speed Mr. Sulu.