The frontrunners

摘要

For much of 2020, the global pharmaceutical industry has coalesced around the same goal. Efforts to develop and manufacture a vaccine for COVID-19 have progressed quickly with unprecedented support and cooperation between government, academia and industry. Domestic initiatives such as Operation Warp Speed in the US, the Vaccine Taskforce in the UK and international collaborations like the COVAX facility, have rapidly accelerated the mission to make viable COVID-19 vaccines available across the world. The enormous pressure on pharmaceutical companies to produce a vaccine as soon as possible led nine of the industry's biggest entities to sign a joint pledge, asserting they would develop vaccines "in accordance with high ethical standards and sound scientific principles". (The companies' insistence that any vaccine would still be subject to rigorous regulatory approval was read by some as a response to the POTUS's claims the FDA was deliberately delaying the process to harm him in the election.)