The main piece of data that would help answer this question is case-studies of past vaccines, whether they had safety problems and what those problems were, and when the problems manifested. Given that there’s a new influenza vaccine every year, and I’ve never heard of any year’s influenza vaccine being rejected on safety grounds, my guess is that 18 months is much too conservative.
I think each year’s flu vaccine is a slight modification on an existing vaccine. This may well (read: I have no idea, but it sounds plausible) make it faster to safety test the flu vaccine than a vaccine for a novel disease.
This is correct. We have lots of infrastructure and expertise for making new flu vaccines every year. It’s not a good model for how long we should expect safety testing to take for a vaccine for a new virus. We don’t have any licensed vaccines for any coronavirus, for example.
The main piece of data that would help answer this question is case-studies of past vaccines, whether they had safety problems and what those problems were, and when the problems manifested. Given that there’s a new influenza vaccine every year, and I’ve never heard of any year’s influenza vaccine being rejected on safety grounds, my guess is that 18 months is much too conservative.
I think each year’s flu vaccine is a slight modification on an existing vaccine. This may well (read: I have no idea, but it sounds plausible) make it faster to safety test the flu vaccine than a vaccine for a novel disease.
This is correct. We have lots of infrastructure and expertise for making new flu vaccines every year. It’s not a good model for how long we should expect safety testing to take for a vaccine for a new virus. We don’t have any licensed vaccines for any coronavirus, for example.
I hardly think it answers the question, but this might be of interest: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html