Vaxxers summary

With the 2014 Ebola outbreak, it was clear that the systems in place to combat rapidly spreading viruses were inadequate.

Ebola outbreaks actually date back to 1976, but by 2014, there were still no licensed vaccines or approved treatments for the disease, despite its fatality rate of between 40 and 50 percent.

To understand how platform technology works and why it was so useful in accelerating development of the COVID-19 vaccine, consider the analogy of a baker who offers birthday cakes with personalized messages.

Let’s say you want to order a cake for a friend's birthday. You tell the baker what the cake should say and how it should be decorated. Now, if business is slow, the baker starts the entire baking and decorating process from scratch. But once orders start piling up, that method takes too long. So instead, she bakes and ices many cakes each day, then adds customized messages and finishing touches for specific orders as they come in.

By the end of January 2020, Sarah, Cath, and their respective teams at Oxford were already hard at work making the vaccine – and applying for funding. Because the labs had limited capacity and COVID-19 took priority, they also had to put other vaccine development projects on the back burner. The process of “decorating the cake” – adding the virus’s unique genetic material to the ChAdOx1 platform – actually involves several different steps. Normally, each of these steps would take months or even years, and the funding applications alone require a lot of waiting between steps.

With this new rapid method of development, however, Sarah and Cath’s teams at the Clinical BioManufacturing Facility could move on to the next step before all the testing was finished on the previous step – an approach known as proceeding at risk.

The number of lives a vaccine can save doesn’t just depend on how effective it is in trials, but also on how many doses you can produce, how many people will have access to it, and how many will choose to get vaccinated.

In order for the latter two factors to even come into play, the scientists at the CBF in Oxford needed to produce their vaccine at a much larger scale.

While designing and producing the first COVID-19 vaccines took just over two months, it was all in preparation for the final stage before licensing: efficacy trials. This stage would take a further seven months. Luckily, the same ChAdOx1 platform was employed in previous influenza and MERS vaccines, so much of the early testing on dosing had already been completed.

But since this was a brand new virus and very little was still known about its behavior, scientists at the CBF and the University of Oxford’s Centre for Clinical Vaccinology and Tropical Medicine, or CCVTM, decided to be extra careful. Certain vaccines have the potential to cause a worse infection in recipients if they come into contact with the actual virus later on.

With the first vaccinations being injected into arms around the world, the work of reining in the virus – and preparing for the next one – was just getting started. 

Along with the logistical hurdles of production and distribution, there was a more human obstacle: global vaccination campaigns have, in certain communities, been met with skepticism, posing a threat to the vaccine’s overall effectiveness.