Courtesy of a JP Morgan analytical report, see below for a fair use reproduction of a table of therapeutics in development that might attack some or another aspect of the Covid-19 problem. Note that these drugs fall in to three broad categories: Vaccines, direct viral inhibitors, and immunomodulators. In rough terms, vaccines provoke your body to develop anti-bodies to the disease, direct viral inhibitors go after the virus directly, and immunomodulators tune your immune system to go after the virus.
In case you haven’t picked it up elsewhere, vaccines take a long time to develop because they are designed to be administered in massive numbers to theoretically healthy populations. If a vaccine is a little bit harmful to a small percentage of people it can still hurt a lot of people, and in most circumstances that vitiates the benefit. Therefore, the received wisdom and regulatory framework require that vaccines be studied in large clinical trials over a relatively long period of time.
Therapeutics are a different animal. Because we use them to treat people who already have the disease, in rough terms they only need to be less harmful than the disease. That is a much lower bar to prove in the clinic, requiring far fewer patients and much less time.
Of course, we might in the end conclude we were willing to take bigger risks with a Covid-19 vaccine than usual, because of the broader public health and economic consequences of prolonging the pandemic. Stay tuned.
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