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really not in our favor. Chapter 6 Get ready to make vaccines It is easy to forget, now that billions of people have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, that the odds were not in humanity's favor. I mean they were really not in our favor. The fact that scientists were able to create multiple successful COVID vaccines is itself unusual in the history of disease. The fact that they did it in roughly a year is miraculous. <~?~Insert art 024_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Vaccines for COVID-19 were developed at an unprecedented pace. It took scientists only one year to create safe and effective vaccines for COVID-19. As a comparison, nearly eighty years passed between identifying whooping cough as a disease and immunizing 35 percent of the population against it. (Our World in Data) Pharmaceutical companies, being the data hounds that they are, have a way of measuring the chance that a drug or vaccine candidate will make it all the way through the arduous process of being approved for use in humans. This measure, which is called the Probability of Technical and Regulatory Success, depends on several factors, including whether similar products have proved successful. If you're testing a vaccine that works more or less the same way as one that has already been approved, your odds are better.