How to get a COVID-19 vaccine faster

By Raymond J. March. He is an assistant professor of economics at North Dakota State University. Excerpt:

"Developing a vaccine, although much less invasive than the other options, will require pioneering medical breakthroughs at record speed.

Hoping to beat the odds, President Trump launched Operation Warp Speed last May. The operation creates a partnership between private drug developers and several federal agencies to develop and distribute a vaccine by January.

Having considered 14 different drug developers, Operation Warp Speed recently selected five finalists for its partnership. Sparing no expense, it has distributed over $2 billion in R&D funds to these producers.

But why only five?

Even the most promising potential vaccines are just beginning the large-sample human-testing vaccine approval process, the most time-consuming and difficult component. With over 100 vaccines under development, there are a variety of options to diversify the risk for finalists that do not receive approval. 

Evidence indicates that including more drug developers would provide us with the highest chance to get a vaccine. A model created by Accelerated Health Technologies predicts that a candidate pool of 15-20 vaccines would have an 80-to-90 percent chance for one to succeed.

Perhaps more important, providing a few producers with extensive financial support is no substitute for the collaboration among a diverse set of researchers that is often required to make a medicinal breakthrough. In his book "The Organization of Inquiry," economist Gordon Tullock stressed that the scientific field closely resembles the division of labor, where a large network of scientists collaborates directly or indirectly by working on narrow aspects of a larger puzzle.

Similar collaboration has brought us pathbreaking vaccine development before.

From 2014 to 2016 the Ebola virus rapidly spread through western Africa, where it caused over 11,000 deaths. Similar to COVID-19, Ebola was difficult to contain and exceptionally difficult to develop a vaccine for.

Despite the odds, scientists, public-health experts, and drug producers indirectly collaborated across the globe to create a "miracle" vaccine within a year. As one "STAT" article notes:

While the vaccine has come to be known as Merck’s Ebola vaccine, in reality, scores of researchers and Ebola outbreak response workers in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Africa played a role in paving Ervebo’s path to licensure, whether that was in designing it, conducting pivotal pre-clinical studies in animals, or the clinical trials Merck used to support its application.

Our best hope to develop a COVID-19 vaccine quickly is to allow drug developers to employ a diverse set of approaches and let the scientific method dictate solutions. Unfortunately, I fear Operation Warp Speed undermines this approach with government-selected winners and losers, which decreases the chances of success. Here’s hoping I’m wrong."