VACCINES VERSUS COVID-19 VACCINES: MANEUVER TIMELINE OF DEVELOPMENT AND TRIAL DESIGNS

Recent pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has made a serious threat to public health and became a global burden with millions of people at risk of death. At that time, there were no approved antiviral drugs and vaccines for COVID-19, but few drugs are repurposed with limited benefit. In less than a year, several COVID-19 vaccines have already been approved and hundreds of vaccines are undergoing clinical evaluation. This review focuses on need for vaccines, benefits of vaccination, the World Health Organization initiated new global strategy ‘the Immunization Agenda 2030’ (IA2030), stages and timeline of development, and clinical evaluation of traditional vaccines. We have summarized comparison of clinical evaluation between traditional vaccines and conventional drugs in the pre-pandemic era. The review briefly discusses the prioritized approaches, accelerated timeline of clinical evaluation, and seamless and immunobridging clinical trial designs of COVID-19 vaccines in the pandemic period. We have thoroughly searched recent literature and data on this topic and made a summary of current advances, regulatory amendments, and future perspectives of development and approval of vaccines.