Summary
Most of us were blindsided by the novel virus SarsCov2, but infectious disease experts had been warning about the possibility of a global pandemic for some years. For them it was never a matter of if, but when. What did come as a surprise was the speed of scientific progress to fight Covid 19. The first effective vaccine, from Pfizer/BioNTech, was developed in under 300 days, followed in successive weeks by Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca. The results of the UK’s RECOVERY trial, which was organised in a matter of weeks, has saved an estimated million lives worldwide by identifying which treatments are effective in treating Covid 19. And regulators around the globe, like Britain’s MHRA, are using innovative programmes to get medical products to people faster. During the pandemic, the world witnessed how fast medicine can advance with an abundance of cash and collaboration. Is progress at this speed and cost sustainable? Sandra Kanthal asks if drug development is something which should still take decades, or have we learned how to permanently accelerate the process?
Guests:
Rod MacKenzie, Chief Development Officer, Pfizer Nuala Murphy, President Clinical Research Services, Icon Professor Sir Martin Landray, Co-Chief Investigator, RECOVERY Trial Nicholas Jackson, Head of Programmes and Technology, CEPI Christian Schneider, Interim Chief Scientific Officer, MHRA Hilda Bastian, Independent Scientist
Producer and Presenter Sandra Kanthal Editor Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
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| 0:41.0 | Hello, thanks for listening to this edition of Analysis. podcasts. producer of this edition. Over the next half hour I'm going to be examining what the |
| 0:54.3 | pandemic has taught us about how to speed up medical research. On November 9th |
| 0:59.2 | last year in the grip of a deadly pandemic, the world caught a break. |
| 1:04.0 | A great day for science and humanity is how the developers of a vaccine have described results that show it is effective against the coronavirus. |
| 1:15.0 | This is the day we first heard about a successful trial of a vaccine against COVID-19. |
| 1:20.0 | And it didn't just work, it worked spectacularly. |
| 1:24.0 | The world's leading scientists have expressed their delight |
| 1:27.0 | following the news that a vaccine against coronavirus |
| 1:30.0 | has proved 90% effective in early results. |
| 1:33.6 | There were two headline numbers that day. |
| 1:35.8 | The one you're more likely to remember is that 90%, the estimated efficacy of the new jab. |
| 1:41.7 | The other number is 300 because for the first time in history it took |
| 1:46.5 | under 300 days to develop a new vaccine. Though we were lucky, research into these |
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