The COVID-19 pandemic may have plunged you into a world of science — specifically vaccine development — that you didn’t know much about before. Maybe you’ve learned that vaccines typically take years to produce. Or maybe you sometimes find yourself wondering about the lives of the millions of chickens whose eggs we rely on to make flu vaccines.
And if you’ve found yourself wondering how the roughly 200 SARS-CoV-2 vaccines in development are supposed to work, you’ve come to the right place. When it comes to designing these preventative treatments, “there is an art to it, and a trial-and-error part of it,” says Shayan Sharif, an immunologist at the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph in Canada. Scientists working on these vaccines will be cycling through these trials and errors for the foreseeable future, too — giving you plenty of time to learn about what they’re doing.
