You can’t rush certain things. Producing a vaccine is one of those things. Generating a vaccine for the Coronavirus will take as long as it takes. It does not matter how many companies are working on it or how much money we spend.
A good analogy is pregnancy. If one woman gets pregnant, it takes nine months to get a baby. If three women get pregnant, it will not get you a baby in three months. No matter how many women get pregnant, you can’t speed the process up; it takes nine months to gestate a fetus.
The approach to multiple companies trying to produce a virus cannot speed up the process because, like pregnancy, vaccine production relies on biological processes. It takes time to grow a vaccine. Time for the immune system to respond to the vaccine. And even more time to find out if it is safe and effective. Each company working on an immunization faces the same biological restrictions, just like every pregnant woman is looking at the same nine months of pregnancy.
The rationale for having multiple companies work on the vaccine is to ensure that we get a success. It is sad, but not every pregnancy leads to a healthy child. If multiple women are pregnant, the odds of getting at least one healthy child improves. If numerous companies are working on vaccines, the odds that one will be successful improves. But it is no guarantee.
The medical world has many illnesses for which it has yet to produce vaccines. Despite decades of work and millions of dollars invested, many infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, and the common cold still do not have vaccines. The last of these is especially important to think about because the common cold is in the same family of viruses as COVID-19. It is incredibly hard to manufacture vaccines for some viruses and may even prove impossible.
The reason for having multiple companies work on a vaccine for Coronavirus is not to speed the process but to increase the odds of a success. That strategy will only work if those companies are trying different approaches and are willing to share their results so others can learn from their successes and failures. Unfortunately, that is not the way pharmaceutical companies generally work. They tend to focus on creating copycat drugs and being secretive about their work.
Only time will tell when, or if, we get a vaccine for Coronavirus. It tends to take years in the best of cases and never happens in the worst. Having many different laboratories working on the problem at once may increase the odds of success. It will not speed up the process. To quote the President of the United States on COVID-19, “It is what it is.”