“When you hear predictions about it taking at best a year or a year and a half to have a vaccine available … there’s no way to come close to those timelines unless we take new approaches,” Feinberg said.

In this context, these new approaches include skipping over some animal testing, although virologists at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases did give the experimental vaccine to lab mice on the same day that the human trial began recruiting participants, according to Stat News.

Researchers fast-track coronavirus vaccine by skipping key animal testing first _ Live Science