Dr Siddarth Sridhar from the Department of Microbiology at HKUMed discusses the development of a COVID-19 vaccine. He mentions that several groups are working on innovative vaccine designs and some have progressed to phase one studies. However, there are still obstacles to overcome, such as the lack of a model for human coronavirus vaccines, uncertainty about which designs will work, and scalability and distribution issues. The earliest a commercially available vaccine could be expected is towards the end of 2021.