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I think they might be out faster than some think. Bayer said they had 3 million tablets ready to go, so it's just a matter of distribution and so on. CDC and some of the others are playing politics with it because they didn't make the discovery that malaria medication works on it
Slight clarification, the hydroxychloroquineplus plus zpack treatment Bayer is talking about is still a tentative (but very hopeful) treatment not a vaccine. Hydroxychloroquineplus used to treat malaria, lupus, and a few other diseases and has a lot of interesting properties (I've learned way more about zinc ionophores in the last week than I ever wanted to want to know). The zpack (azithromycin) being used alongside it is nominally an antibiotic so probably treats co-infections but may have some weird beneficial side effects which are still unclear, it's a weird drug with a lot of plausibly beneficial side effects in some of these cases. If we can use this to suppress the critical cases to non-critical at least that would take a lot of strain off of the system (and it's something that there is widespread capacity for production and deployment). The really hopeful part about this treatment is that it appears to reduce viral shedding (how infectious the person is) so it could help reduce the spread dramatically if we can also improve early detection and testing and then isolate and treat those cases. Early trials show it cutting both the severity of and also the duration of most cases (appears to be especially effective on early/mild cases).
There is some really interesting work being done on re-using existing vaccines though - a wide scale test was just done with some healthcare workers in the Netherlands with Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCG_vaccine) which is used as a tuberculosis vaccine (and bladder cancer treatment!) in much of the world (but not Italy or the US) but apparently has widespread effects on other diseases as an immune system booster - https://www.radboudumc.nl/en/news/2...lthcare-workers-against-coronavirus-infection There is some tentative evidence that some of the more severe problems maybe due to co-infections with other diseases but I haven't seen anything definitive yet. Note that this is NOT an vaccine against SCV2 but may provide some protection and reduce the seriousness of infections.
The medical system is indeed moving at light speed but an actual vaccine in widespread deployment of a real vaccine is extremely unlikely for at least a year. Hopefully we can improve the containment and treatment in the meantime though which will make the interim a lot less costly and painful.
Watching the data come out has been really interesting, but I'm mostly wishing this was a less statistically interesting time!!!