The new study led by an Irish economist at an international think tank, the Centre for Global Development, says that the chances of having a vaccine approved for use will rise to 50/50 by next April.
The chance of a vaccine being approved will be at 85 per cent by December 2021, according to the study.
Economist Anthony McDonnell, originally from Galway, led the research team and says the resources currently being pumped into vaccine development are completely unprecedented.
We’re not cutting down the quality of the trials, they’re still going to make sure that the vaccines are safe and efficacious, they’re just doing it in a route that is quicker.
“It would be the quickest a vaccine has ever been developed. Often trials that always really take place one after the other, are taking place simultaneously, which is much less cost-effective,” he said.
“But because Covid is having such a profound impact on everybody’s lives, spending more money to run trials more quickly than we would normally run them makes sense.
“We’re not cutting down the quality of the trials, they’re still going to make sure that the vaccines are safe and efficacious, they’re just doing it in a route that is quicker.”
Record
The Centre for Global Development study says that scientists are now on track to set a new record for the development of a new human vaccine because of the scale of these resources.
“[The study] suggests that there’s a very low chance that a vaccine would be approved in 2020, but from kind of January on, it becomes quite likely in any month that a vaccine will be approved,” Mr McDonnell says.
“April is the point at which we see a 50/50 chance of approval and our estimates suggest that there’ll be an 85 per cent chance of approval by the end of 2021.
“So we’re quite hopeful that one of the 235 vaccines in the portfolio will be successful to approval, which is different from succeeding to manufacture.”
