Hacker News Reader

Comment by danieltillett | Hacker News Reader

A vaccine is defiantly the way to go, but do we have the infrastructure (or will) to produce a vaccine in the quantities required? The progress towards a vaccine seems to be rather lackadaisical given the scale of the problem.

View on HN

I bet we will see things speeding up as we get more "patient zero" episodes in developed countries, putting pressure on Western governments who will, in turn, pressure the pharmaceutical industry.

I'd go out on a limb and say that this would have happened already, if it weren't for the fact that the "avian flu" fiasco / profiteering is still very fresh in people's minds.

The problem is you can’t just click your fingers and suddenly have a new vaccine on demand. We have yet to have even stage 1 testing of any candidate vaccine for Ebola. Once we have a vaccine we need to produce millions of doses and then distribute it in countries with no functioning health infrastructure. And we need to get all this done in a couple of months!

There is already a functional system for distributing basic vaccines across the world, reaching 80% of babies.

It would not be difficult to distribute the vaccine, and we don't have to get everyone - we just have to get the viral rate below 1.

This system was not set up from scratch in a couple of months. I think you are underestimating the difficult of distributing a vaccine we don't have in west Africa once the case numbers there reaches into the millions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com