Will there be a vaccine?
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2020
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A vaccine is the magic bullet that would end the coronavirus pandemic, but how many months will it take to find, and will it be available to all?
Justin Rowlatt speaks to a pioneering researcher of coronaviruses - not just the one behind the current Covid-19 outbreak. Susan Weiss of Pennsylvania University says the fact it was such a neglected area was one of the things that first attracted her to study these microbes. Today we know much more, but still not enough about how to inoculate against it, according to Leeds University virologist Stephen Griffin.
But with dozens of medical companies now racing to find a cure, the big question is whether governments will make it available to everyone who needs it on the planet - the only certain way to defeat the pandemic - and who will pay for it? Healthcare venture capitalist Peter Kolchinsky is positive that when a vaccine is found, the businesspeople behind it will do the right thing.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: A researcher in Brazil works on virus replication in order to develop a Covid-19 vaccine; Credit: Douglas Magno/AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Business Daily with me, Justin Rowlat. There is a magic bullet that would stop this |
| 0:07.7 | pandemic and that is a vaccine. So how can we develop one and how long will it take? The good news first, |
| 0:15.1 | we already have coronavirus vaccines, just not for humans. We have several vaccines now for chicken coronaviruses. |
| 0:23.6 | And there's kind of a weak vaccine for dogs. |
| 0:25.6 | There's a vaccine for pigs and for cows. |
| 0:28.6 | Okay, so here's the bad news. |
| 0:30.6 | We don't really know how long we'll be waiting for a human COVID-19 vaccine to turn up. |
| 0:35.6 | It's not simply a question of time, unfortunately. |
| 0:39.5 | You know, you can try something 10 times and it will only work on the 11th time, for example. |
| 0:43.1 | But I don't think we've ever seen a concertive research effort such as this before. |
| 0:47.5 | It really depends if things all go your way or not. |
| 0:50.0 | That is all here on Business Daily on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:57.6 | In the last few weeks, we've all learned quite a bit about coronaviruses, |
| 1:02.9 | and not just the one that's causing the current pandemic. |
| 1:05.9 | You probably know, for example, that we've had two other coronavirus outbreaks in the last two decades. SARS in 2002 |
| 1:13.3 | and then MERS in 2012. So why didn't we learn from them? Professor Susan Weiss of the University |
| 1:20.5 | of Pennsylvania has been captivated by coronaviruses ever since she first came across what was then an intriguing but arcane branch of |
| 1:32.1 | virology. It's kind of a story. When I was a postdoc, I was studying retroviruses, and this was like |
| 1:38.0 | at the end of the 70s, and I really wanted to be a virologist. So I just looked through a journal of |
| 1:43.5 | virology, and I saw, wow, these |
| 1:45.2 | coronaviruses, they're really interesting because they cause diseases in all kinds of animals. |
| 1:50.3 | They're important pathogens. There was very little known about human coronaviruses at that time. |
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