Vaccine development experts believe an effective vaccine will not be available to the general public before Fall 2021, possibly Summer 2022, according to a new paper published by McGill researchers in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
From infection routes and incubation time to severity of symptoms and wildfire-like spreading, COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the world. For many, a vaccine means they will be able to breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, that relief may not be as close as some politicians and media reports have suggested.
Researchers at McGill University in Canada surveyed 28 experts with 25 median years of experience working with vaccines in June 2020. Most were based on Canada, with 6 in the United States. Twenty worked in academia, 6 in industry and 2 in government.
The researchers asked the vaccine experts to project timeline forecasts for three milestones in vaccine development. Specifically, experts were asked for their best, soonest and latest estimates for each of the following.
1. When will a vaccine be available to the general public in the U.S. and/or Canada?
Survey respondents chose September/October 2021 as their best guess regarding availability of a COVID-19 vaccine to the general public. On average, they believe the soonest would be June 2021, the latest July 2022.
2. When will a field study with at least 5,000 participants report results?
The experts believe the soonest we will see a report of this magnitude is December 2020, but more likely to be March 2021—a full year after the pandemic officially began in much of the U.S. Thankfully, the latest projection is just a few months after, in July 2021.
3. When will a vaccine be available to those at highest risk from the virus in the U.S. and/or Canada?
There’s a bit more optimism among vaccine experts when it comes to vaccinating frontline workers, the elderly and those severely immunocompromised. They believe this can happen by March/April 2021, or possibility even February 2021. They projected the end of 2021 as the latest.
Additional survey questions gauged the experts’ view on two possible setbacks—a severe side effects warning and the probability of a vaccine not working after clinical tests. On average, 30% of the experts said the FDA would issue a black box warning for a widely deployed, while 40% think it is possible that the first field study in the U.S. or Canada will report a null or negative result on an efficacy endpoint.
Lastly, experts were split on whether the pace of COVID-19 research is increasing the potential for errors—53% agreed, 14% were neutral and 32% disagreed.
"Our study finds that experts are largely in agreement about the timeline for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine," said Stephen Broomell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who collaborated with the McGill research team. "While this does not track with many overly optimistic government projections, it reflects a belief that researchers are indeed on a faster pace to development compared with previous vaccines."