How does a vaccine get made?

How did scientists make COVID vaccines so quickly?   Here's a look at how vaccines are made.

Transcript

00:00Right now we're in a race to save lives. So we cannot wait. So I would say to those people who

00:06are fearful of the vaccine being made too fast, it's not fast-tracked in a way where we're making

00:13shortcuts and we're not worried about long-term effects. It's just that it gets pushed to the

00:18front of the line. When you're looking for solutions in the vaccine, it depends on what

00:35the goal is. Some researchers' goal is to attack the virus itself, maybe using its ligands that

00:43you see that pop out like spikes. Maybe you want to attack those and maybe destroy the virus itself,

00:48or you want to use your cells and hijack your cells' machinery and tell it to attack the virus

00:55or not accept the virus at all. Maybe build something around your cell to protect it from

01:00the COVID virus from even attaching to your cell. Because any virus needs a human to survive.

01:07A virus is not a living thing.

01:14In the vaccine race to get to an actual treatment, you have to go through

01:24mice, you have to go through chimps, you have to inject them with your

01:28compound. You cannot call it a vaccine quite yet. You can only call it a compound. You can call it a

01:36solution.

01:46Once phase one trials start, you determine what dosage is the lowest that will have an effect on

01:54the human. So you want to start low. Once you start at a low concentration of this

01:59vaccine, this future vaccine, you start increasing the dosage from when it starts affecting a human

02:06to when it is too much. And somewhere in between there, you are giving different doses to

02:14two different humans.

02:20It becomes more randomized with the amount of people that you choose for your trial. So you

02:26want all types of people. You want people with varying ages, you want people with varying

02:33sociodynamic statuses, you want people of varying races and backgrounds and all of that. It is

02:40important to have as much spread data as possible when you are doing your trials.

02:48And in phase three is the biggest trial of them all because you increase your sample size

02:52and you start comparing the standard of what is already out there, if there is such a thing,

02:58to your new drug. And then you compare to see if it is any better.

03:02If it is any better, then that's great news.

03:17So now we are just looking at side effects. So you start building side effects of this vaccine.

03:33So for instance, Moderna, if they get FDA approval for their vaccine,

03:39in order for the entire world to get this vaccine, they will have to license out their product.

03:44So Moderna will license out their product to other manufacturers who can make it. And those

03:50manufacturers get all the raw materials that are necessary and start making it and distribute it.

04:08Considering that we have been in this for less than a year, it does seem very fast.

04:13But again, in the FDA journey of creating a drug at all, from the moment of conception

04:22until the approval of the FDA, there is a lot of waiting time. There is a lot of downtime

04:28because the government is slow. The FDA is a government entity and it just runs really slow.