[anonymouz]

It seems the reason the vaccine will take so long (12-18months) to develop is because it needs to be tested for long-term safety which takes a trial with long-term monitoring. As this is essentially a sort of (active) vaccine, how do you propose ensuring it's long-term safety? It seems you'd run into essentially the same problem as with developing the vaccine.

[riedel]

It seems to me that the whole article describes to me an alternative way to find a vaccine . Maybe someone can enlighten me: aren't there vaccines that are simply rather harmless mutations/relatives of the virus but trigger the same immune reaction?

[grey-area]

Yes, there are

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine

[danieltillett]

By doing an end run around the regulations. Actually even if you were to follow all the vaccine regulations by choice this would still be faster as it would have already been tested in human. Nature has run the trials for us.

[anonymouz]

I don't see the point of this. Nature has most certainly not established the long-term effects of this virus, seeing as it has only been spreading in humans for a short while.

Skirting the regulations is pointless, because the important thing is the intent of the regulations. If it were just a problem with the regulations, we could also just change the regulations and give the untested vaccine.

Plus, if you want to argue from a pure legal background, this approach would probably still run into trouble, as in most countries it would be highly illegal to infect people on purpose.