Premarket Development Times for Innovative Vaccines–To What Extent Are the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Vaccines Outliers?

Using patent filing dates as a marker of commercial development initiation, the authors found that the BioNTech/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine had a 10-year development timeline from key patent filings to regulatory authorization, which aligns with the established pattern of shortening vaccine development timelines since the 1980s and does not represent an outlier compared to other recently approved vaccines. The findings suggest that COVID-19 vaccine development timelines are comparable to other modern vaccines and drugs, indicating that vaccine hesitancy concerns about rapid development may not be supported by objective measures of drug development time.