Chris

It hasn’t been rushed - what has happened is that a long ton of resources have been thrown at it, at the expense of everything else those researchers would otherwise have been working on at the same time. In normal circumstances it is economics that drives the pharmaceutical development schedule as much as the actual science.

And, this can’t be stressed enough, this is a vaccine, not a drug therapy. All vaccines use a limited range of approaches to achieve the same basic response in the human body. There is a lot less that is unknown at the start of the process and a lot of work the researchers could simply get on and do, without first having to design and test novel chemical compounds in a lab (which does often take years).