Personally I think the idea that an effective vaccine will be available for manufacture by September is for the birds but as stated many times I'm a medical pleb. Bill Gates is saying 12 to 18 months and my guess is he will be closer to the mark. Nonetheless, if we assume the September goal is realistic the article below raises other concerns.
Millions of doses to be made before coronavirus vaccine has been proven
The Jenner Institute in Oxford hopes to have a vaccine, and a million doses of it, by September, and possibly hundreds of millions of doses by the new year. This was “probably the most ambitious scale-up programme”, the institute said.
There are two UK vaccine factories; one, run by Seqirus, is capable of making injectable jabs. The UK drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is a leading manufacturer of vaccines but carries out the work at facilities in the US and Belgium.
“It’s something the government has realised for a number of years and is trying to address but this pandemic has hit us too early,” Professor Brendan Wren, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said
The government is fast-tracking the construction of a Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre at Harwell, Oxfordshire, which had not been due to open until 2022. It is designed to make research vaccines for clinical trials rather than on a commercial scale.
Karl Simpson, a biologist who wrote a report for the government’s UK Vaccine Network, said Britain had let its vaccine industry “slip away”, adding: “If we want to make, say 100 million doses of vaccine, we’re simply not in the game any more”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/millions-of-doses-before-coronavirus-vaccine-has-been-proven-h6ttf8bx9
Originally Posted by: Brian Gaze