This is coronavirus daily from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. A vaccine is not a sure thing.

And while early results do look promising, they're still a long way to go.

What the vaccine development process looks like, and later even kids have questions about

what's going on right now. Public Health experts answer those questions on the national

conversation with all things considered. Here's NPR's Ari Shapiro.

You've sent us a lot of questions about possible vaccines to protect against the coronavirus

and here to help answer those questions is NPR's Joe Palca. Good to have you back, Joe.

Thanks Ari, how you doing? I'm all right, thanks. Good. Let's take a listen to a question.

This comes from Logan and San Francisco. What goes into making a vaccine for this type of

virus? Yeah, it's a really, I mean, from a scientific standpoint, it's a really interesting

question. So what the scientists are trying to do is to find something that looks to the

immune system just as if a virus had come into its body and was about to infect it.

So they study the thing on the outside of the virus that the immune system first sees

and they try to replicate that in one way or another. And in the case of the coronavirus,

it's a protein on the outside. It looks like I've been thinking about it like it's like

a clove stuck into a tennis ball. So it's something that exquisitely recognizes this clove

and then figures out a way to just take the clove, not the whole virus, but the clove by

itself or with a few other things attached, but not the whole virus or not a healthy virus

and put that into a vaccine. And the immune system will say, oh, I think this is an infection,

but of course, it's not. So it will recognize it. And then the next time if the real thing

comes along, it'll say, oh, I've seen that before and that it'll respond. Our next listener,

Sue Joll is also in San Francisco and he wonders this. So far, what progress has been made by the

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