Zika vaccine: Why developing one will take years in a skewed system

When microbiologist Maurice Hilleman was testing his revolutionary mumps vaccine in the 1960s, parents allowed their children to participate in the clinical trial in a simple way: They signed their names on an index card, right below a sentence indicating that they gave permission for their child to receive the experimental inoculation. In the decades since, the world of vaccine development has grown vastly more complicated, to a point where critics describe it as failing to meet the needs of public health in a timely fashion. Nowhere has this gap become more apparent than in the face of emerging threats like the Zika virus, a vaccine for which researchers have warned could take up to a decade to bring to market. But a system that some public health experts and vaccine developers describe on a scale of skewed to broken is also one that others argue is responding as best it...