Listen: Is There a Vaccine Shortcut?
Researchers could deliberately expose people to the coronavirus to speed up the development of a vaccine. Is it worth it?
On the latest episode of the Social Distance podcast, James Hamblin and Katherine Wells ask the infectious-disease expert Stephen Thomas to explain the medical and ethical issues involved in developing a new vaccine.
Listen to the episode here:
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What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of their conversation.
Katherine Wells: I don’t actually understand how vaccines are developed on any sort of granular level.
How do you go from this tiny prototype in eight people where they didn’t seem to be harmed, to a billion people with a needle in their arm? It is a technical process that could go a
