Firstly, thanks Baal, Dr evil and rain for taking the time to answer questions.
I am curios as to how the logistics of rolling out a vaccine work:
1. If a hypothetical vaccine would pass Phase 2/3 would other researchers stop developing their vaccines?
2. does passing phase 3 which needs only thousands of doses mean that mass production is assured( as in is there a gap when passing phase 3 and mass production or does phase 3 occur simultaneously with creating mass production capability )?
3.Would the information of how to make the vaccine become open source so that everyone could attempt to make a generic version or would the formula stay proprietary?
I'll take these in order:
1. No, other groups and companies would continue, especially if they were very far along in the development path, especially in a disease like this. The analogy is drug development, let's take statin drugs as an example. After the first one one came out, other companies continued to develop their own versions and now many are approved for use, even though they more or less all do the same thing (with some slight differences in adverse effects etc.). Patients with high cholesterol in the world is a huge market, and as a class these drugs are all reasonably effective. This pattern repeats for many different drug classes, and the more widespread the disease the more you see it (see for example gliflozin drugs for diabetes, there are no fewer than seven that have been approved in various countries in the world, four in the US). This would be the same for Covid-19 I am quite sure.
2. My best guess is that it would depend on the nature of the vaccine and the the group that developed it. It is hard to know about supply chains, manufacturing, etc. if you are not in that exact business, and I am not. Companies that have a long record of making vaccines would probably have an advantage, and it is likely that a vaccine developed by a smaller group would require a consortium with other companies for mass production. I think a DNA or RNA vaccine would be easier to scale up just because of the nature of the chemistry.
3. No, it would almost certainly remain proprietary. Even public and private non-profit organizations (like the university where I work) take very good care of their intellectual property rights, especially when there is a chance to make billions of dollars. The Division of Research at my university has frequent presentations on what we should do if we discover something that is worth patenting. How hard it would be to reverse engineer an effective vaccine (something they would try to do in China for sure) would depend a lot on what it is and how it is formulated to be most effective. This would probably be relatively easy to do for a DNA or RNA vaccine (which is a very new technology, but which is being pursued in a bunch of places). It might be a bit harder for more traditional vaccines, and it might also depend on what little tricks they are using to enhance the immune response to the antigen (is there a proprietary adjuvant, are they using a microneedle array, etc. etc.). In other words, finding the antigen is not the hard part.