Most people likely won't get a coronavirus vaccine until the middle of 2021

[TomCADem]

19. The tainted polio vaccine that sickened and fatally paralyzed children in 1955

There are dangers with rushing a vaccine particularly when Trump is setting an arbitrary deadline. This is not just ancient history. Just five years ago, Philippines rushed out a vaccine for dengue fever that turned out to cause dengue.

Adequate testing is vital for a vaccine program to work. If it looks like a vaccine is rushed, and if its efficacy is oversold, then you are going to doom the program.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-polio-vaccine-paralyzed-children-coronavirus/

On Aug. 30, 1954, Bernice E. Eddy, a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., was checking a batch of a new polio vaccine for safety.

Created by Jonas Salk, the vaccine was hailed as the miracle drug that would conquer the dreaded illness that killed and paralyzed children. Eddy’s job was to examine samples submitted by the companies planning to make it.

As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine designed to protect against the disease had instead given polio to a test monkey. Rather than containing killed virus to create immunity, the sample from Cutter contained live, infectious virus. Something was wrong. “There’s going to be a disaster,” she told a friend.

As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure.