Antibodies may precede vaccines in fighting Covid-19. Antibody treatments involve producing antibodies against a disease, either by harvesting them from previously infected individuals or, better, making them using some sort of scientific magic (aka technology that is hard to explain). An antibody treatment can fight an existing virus, and avoid infection short term. Eventually the antibodies go away, so this does not confer immediate immunity.

This is not an uncommon situations. Lots of diseases appeared out of nowhere, and were initially treated this way until other longer term solutions could be developed. But many of those diseases were rare to begin with and remained rare, so the antibody treatment was not scaled up. Just read all those books and stories about “emerging diseases” from back in the “Hot Zone” literature days and you’ll see these stories played out.

Anyway, here is what some experts say quoted in a recent Science coverage by Jon Cohen:

“If you were going to put your money down, you would bet that you get the answer with the monoclonal before you get the answer with a vaccine,” says Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

and

“Antibodies have the potential to be an important bridge until the vaccine is available,” says Ajay Nirula, a vice president at Eli Lilly, one of several large companies investing in them. Likely to be more effective than remdesivir and dexamethasone, the repurposed drugs shown to help against COVID-19, antibodies could protect the highest risk health care workers from becoming infected while also lessening the severity of the disease in hospitalized patients. But producing monoclonals involves using bioreactors to grow lines of B cells that make the proteins, raising concerns they could be scarce and expensive. On 15 July, Lilly, AbCellera, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Genentech, and Amgen jointly asked the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) whether they could share information about manufacturing their monoclonals without violating antitrust laws “to expand and expedite production.”

Antibody expert Amy Jenkins (Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) suggests a N ovember-December time line for seeing this technology in the field is not unrealistic.