Whither a COVID-19 Vaccine?

Dr. Anthony Fauci says he has seen nothing as deadly and nightmarish as COVID-19.  It's already infected seven million people worldwide, two million of them in the United States, with 413,000 deaths worldwide and 116,000 deaths in the U.S.  He also believes that the virus isn't going to simply run its course, as SARS did, and that a vaccine is going to be needed. 

COVID-19 has already devastated and upended so many of us, either directly or indirectly, that all seems hopeless three months into a pandemic that Dr. Fauci is all but suggesting will last until the end of time.  But there is a ray of hope.  Dr. Fauci has been looking at the race to develop a vaccine and he sees the possibility of not one vaccine but two or more being developed . . . and by early 2021 at the earliest.

There's a caveat, of course.  There have to be several tests and phases of testing before an effective safe vaccine can be found.  Dr. Fauci has been wrong before about this virus - he once said that you didn't have to wear face coverings if you didn't show any COVID-19 symptoms - and some skeptics insist that late 2021 or early 2022 is a more realistic time for a vaccine to be made available. Inevitably, people have been asking this one simple question - 

Can a COVID-19 vaccine be found?

Can?  Can?  It must!

A vaccine is our only way out of this mess.  We can't do the simplest thing these days without spreading or catching the virus. That includes breathing.  No amount of social distancing our staying at home is going to end this pandemic.  We must have a vaccine ready, and the sooner we get one, the better.  Failure is not an option!  Because the idea of staying six feet apart, spending most of our time at home, and wearing face coverings whenever we do go out - even when social distancing is feasible  - isn't my idea of a new norm.  It's more like a dystopia.

We need a vaccine urgently.  Maybe we couldn't go on living our lives the way we were before COVID-19 - carbon emissions and all that - but we certainly can't go on living our lives the way we're living them now.

There are 159 possible vaccines being developed.  The odds are that at least one or two of them have to be ready in a few months.