Experience in early hotspots shows need for collaboration, coordination
Bruce Walker, the Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-director of MassCPR, gave a brief overview of the unprecedented, rapid development of vaccines for SARS-CoV-2, noting that many have wondered how the vaccines can have been developed so quickly without compromising safety.
“The answers to that are not due to cutting corners but really to tremendous scientific advances and to some decisions that were made early on to accelerate those aspects that could be safely accelerated,” said Walker, who is director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard. He noted that advances in genetic sequencing and unprecedented scientific collaborations hastened the speed of vaccine development.