A vaccine would be the ultimate weapon against the coronavirus and the best route back to normal life. Officials like Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force, estimate a vaccine could arrive in at least 12 to 18 months. The grim truth behind this rosy forecast is that a vaccine probably won’t arrive any time soon. Clinical trials almost never succeed. We’ve never released a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years — more time than the public or the economy can tolerate social-distancing orders.

But if there was any time to fast-track a vaccine, it is now. So Times Opinion asked vaccine experts how we could condense the timeline and get a vaccine in the next few months instead of years. Here’s how we might achieve the impossible.

Options to shorten the timeline

Start trials early
Rely on work from studying SARS and MERS to shorten preparations before clinical trials
Don’t wait for academic research
Skip to clinical phases using what we know about the coronavirus so far
Normally, researchers need years to secure funding, get approvals and study results piece by piece. But these are not normal times. There are already at least 254 therapies and 95 vaccines related to Covid-19 being explored. “If you want to make that 18-month timeframe, one way to do that is put as many horses in the race as you can,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

Companies with vaccine trials underway

Dozens of vaccines are starting clinical trials. Many use experimental RNA and DNA technology, which provides the body with instructions to produce its own antibodies against the virus.

Despite the unprecedented push for a vaccine, researchers caution that less than 10 percent of drugs that enter clinical trials are ever approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The rest fail in one way or another: They are not effective, don’t perform better than existing drugs or have too many side effects.

Less than 10 percent of drug trials are ultimately approved

Probability of success at each phase of research

Note: Between 2006 and 2015. Source: Biotechnology Innovation Organization, Biomedtracker, Amplion.

Fortunately, we already have a head start on the first phase of vaccine development: research. The outbreaks of SARS and MERS, which are also caused by coronaviruses, spurred lots of research. SARS and SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, are roughly 80 percent identical, and both use so-called spike proteins to grab onto a specific receptor found on cells in human lungs. This helps explain how scientists developed a test for Covid-19 so quickly.

There’s a cost to moving so quickly, however. The potential Covid-19 vaccines now in the pipeline might be more likely to fail because of the swift march through the research phase, said Robert van Exan, a cell biologist who has worked in the vaccine industry for decades. He predicts we won’t see a vaccine approved until at least 2021 or 2022, and even then, “this is very optimistic and of relatively low probability.”

And yet, he said, this kind of fast-tracking is “worth the try — maybe we will get lucky.”

Years and years, at minimum

The vaccine development process has typically taken a decade or longer.

Note: Rotavirus and HPV vaccines include time from filing of the first investigational new drug to approval. Source: “Plotkin’s Vaccines” (7th edition)

The next step in the process is pre-clinical and preparation work, where a pilot factory is readied to produce enough vaccine for trials. Researchers relying on groundwork from the SARS and MERS outbreaks could theoretically move through planning steps swiftly. Sanofi, a French biopharmaceutical company, expects to begin clinical trials late this year for a Covid-19 vaccine that it repurposed from work on a SARS vaccine. If successful, the vaccine could be ready by late 2021.