Overview

Much of the discussion around society’s ability to return to “normality” after the COVID-19 pandemic has centred on the development of a vaccine. This has led to unprecedented collaboration and investment. Vaccine candidate development for COVID-19 is progressing faster than for any other pathogen in history. However, the questions of how long it will take to discover a vaccine, how useful that vaccine will be, and whether the risk has been diversified sufficiently, require research themselves.

To answer these questions and optimize the vaccine portfolio, we have interviewed vaccine experts from academia, industry, and government, to generate estimates for the probabilities of success and timelines for COVID-19 vaccines. We have aggregated these inputs and are releasing them soon in a paper. These findings have been used as inputs for a model we are creating that we hope can estimate timelines for success, as well as identify bottlenecks in both R&D and manufacturing. People will also be able to test these assumptions with their own inputs.

In this event, organized as part of a collaboration with Ariadne Labs, we will outline our results, discuss their implications, and highlight how you can use our model to generate your own estimates for how long it will take to find a COVID-19 vaccine that is safe and efficacious.

Please note this event is run by the Center for Global Development.