Just the Vax, Ma’am
The desperate search for a vaccine is on, with at least 86 candidate vaccines being developed. Most vaccines are approved as safe after passing three trial phases. A number of the COVID candidates are in phase I testing, one has been approved for phase II. This is encouraging but seeing as vaccine approval is apparently modeled after The Legends of the Hidden Temple, we know that the trials get tougher as they go on. Further, discovering a vaccine is obviously an important part, scaling up production so that it is available and distributed is another matter, one typically takes 18 months, though there are technologies in the works that could shorten that window.
No one knows how long this will take but it is encouraging that so many are looking. Countries have an obvious incentive to find a treatment, politically it is a boon of goodwill and a boost of morale for the nation's innovators, economically, it means a country's workforce can return to normalcy quicker. Drug companies have less incentive; vaccines are not money makers the way other drugs are (many firms took big baths on Zika and Swine flu vaccines that were not needed when those diseases ran their courses) but America's largest innovators are responding to the call and collaborating on research. Even celebrities are joining in. Bill and Melinda Gates have been public health promoters (and pandemic alarmists) for sometime and their foundation has a vaccine funding arm. U2's Bono is also involved, releasing COVID-inspired music and giving the proceeds to the search for a vaccine. I'm not sure how I feel about this, Bono has a famously questionable record for finding what he's looking for.
Vaccines work by giving the receiver a manageable strain of the disease, stimulating the recipients immune system. The word vaccine comes from the Latin "vaccinus," which means "pertaining to cows." We call vaccines this because one of the earliest forms of one, designed for smallpox, used strains of cowpox render patients immune. Bovine, the word we use to refer to cows, comes from the Latin word for ox, but you can see how it and vaccine follow the same structure, as do porcine (relating to pigs), equine (horses), galline (chickens).
Edward Jenner, the scientist who developed that first vaccine in 1796, discovered the concept by accident, when a milkmaid told him that none of the dairy farmers who contracted cowpox (which is harmless) never seemed to get smallpox (which is not). Jenner took material from the sores of a cowpox patient and injected them into an eight-year-old boy, who showed mild cowpox symptoms but quickly got over them and then was proven to be resistant to smallpox when Jenner injected him with that. This was apparently during a time when the Hippocratic oath was wrongly translated as "First, do no harm. Unless it's for testing purposes and then go to town on children."
I should point out that the Hippocratic oath does not say "First, do no harm." Nor wasn't written by Hippocrates most likely. Nor are most medical students required to take it at any point. The oldest surviving copy of it dates to 275 AD, 500 years after Hippocrates died. It's just as well that modern doctors don't take the oath because while it contains some good bits ("...I will do no harm or injustice to [my patients]") it also has some weird ones. Takers of the oath have to agree to value their teachers as the equals of their parents and must commit to raise their teacher's children as their own, which is excessive. It also explicitly forbids abortion, which is controversial on a number of levels, starting with calling into question whether Hippocrates even wrote the oath (confirmed writing of Hippocrates describes the procedure with no moral implication) through to our own current political maelstrom around that issue.
A milkmaid's off-hand comment leading to a smallpox vaccine is hardly unique in the world of medicine. Scientists were studying the pancreas' role in digestion when they discovered its role in diabetes, leading to the use of insulin to treat the disease. Dr. George Papanicolaou was conducting a genetic study when he realized that uterine cancer was plainly detectible on vaginal fluid, leading to the smear test that bears his name. Botulinum toxin, commonly known as botox, was used by ophthalmologists to temporarily paralyze eye muscles for diagnostic purposes when cosmetic surgeons figured they could use it for different reasons.
Nor is this phenomenon relegated to medicine. The history of innovation is full of stories of accidental discovery but my favorite may be Josephine Cochran, who invented the dishwasher in 1886, not to save time or reduce the amount of labor, but to keep the damn help from chipping her china. A prominent socialite, Cochran was quite protective of her plates, which had been in the family for centuries, and she couldn't understand why she was paying good money to have incompetent help put dents in them. The legend goes she sent the staff home in a fury and tried to wash the dishes herself, only to discover that it was impossible to do it right without wear and tear, leading to her invention of a steam-powered dishwasher.
I don't know what twists and turns the hunt for a vaccine has in store but it's a good bet some unforeseen fortunate discovery while a perceptive scientist is looking the other way will be involved.