No, standards were not compromised nor were safety procedures ignored in producing COVID-19 vaccine. It is huge misconception to assume that the work on COVID-19 vaccine started when the pandemic began. Prior to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, scientists had experimented and perfected a fast and flexible method- plug and play-to revolutionise vaccine development and production.
Researchers at Oxford University had constructed ChAdOx1 – or Chimpanzee Adenovirus Oxford One and used it as the building block for vaccine against almost any disease. Before COVID-19, over three hundred people had been given ChAdOx1 based-vaccines for diseases ranging from flu to Zika virus, and prostate cancer to the tropical disease chikungunya. The ChAdOx1 is modified to contain the genetic blueprints for whatever you want to train the immune system to attack. ChAdOx1 is in essentially a sophisticated, microscopic postman, and scientists then change the package, such as COVID-19 spike proteins to be delivered by the ChAdOx1 postman.
