Tag Archives: Science

DO YOU TRUST YOUR GUT FEELINGS?

Everyone—you and me included—has heard their small inner voice speak. It might have been a muffled word of sage advice, a loud yell of urgent caution, or a simple suggestion towards the right move. Evolutionary, our subconscious source of wisdom has served us well—“Whoa! Don’t step outside the cave right now” to “Hey! This wheel and axle invention will be big.” But as real as intuition is, many people choose to ignore their instincts. How about you? Do you trust your gut feelings?

There are lots of terms for gut feelings. Intuition is the main one, but there’re differences of opinion as to what constitutes raw instinct, subtle intuition based on life experience, and plain old gut feelings—also known as the sixth sense, vibes, foresight, precognition, visceral nudges, being-in-the-world, hunches, and downright lucky guesses. These are socially-acceptable labels, not to be confused with pseudoscience stuff like tactic knowledge, remote viewing, morphic resonance, ESP, clairvoyance, and cryptesthesia. Then there’s a half-way, new-age idea called Grok. You might want to Google that.

What got me going on today’s post is a recent comment left on an old DyingWords thread where a fellow made a statement that relying on gut feelings amounted to as much as taking a ride on a Ouija board. “Hang on a moment,” I replied. “I have decades of investigation experience and, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, I’ve come to rely on my gut feelings—hunches, intuition, Grok, or whatever you wanna call them.”

Just a quick personal story before we move on to look at the philosophy, psychology, and physiology behind intuition as well as taking a test to see how much you trust your gut feelings. In 1985, I was part of a police Emergency Response Team (ERT or SWAT for Americans). We were sent to the frozen wilds of the Canadian north to arrest an armed and murderous madman. Michael Oros, the bad guy, got the drop on my partner and me just as I had this incredible gut feeling that he’d silently crept up behind us. I spun around right as the fire-fight started. Because of this intuitive gut feeling—this overpowering presence of imminent danger—I was able to react to save my life and probably the lives of other teammates.

I didn’t imagine that gut feeling. It was as real as the keyboard I’m writing this on, and I have no explanation for it other than we, as human beings, are hard-wired to receive subconscious information through a process best known as intuition. Whether we use our gut feeling’s information or discard it is a matter of personal choice.

Gut feeling intuition has fascinated scientists and philosophers. It fascinates me, as well, and I don’t qualify as either a scientist or a philosopher. It’s not just people who have intuition and gut feelings. Why do dogs seem to know when their owners are coming home, and why do horses naturally understand what people to trust and what people to mistrust? Is it animal common sense?

Surely there’s more to human intuition/gut feeling than common sense. Something else is at work here, and the philosophical theories go back as far as Plato. In his book Republic, Plato defined intuition as “a fundamental capacity for human reason to comprehend the true nature of reality—a pre-existing knowledge residing in the soul of eternity—truths not arrived at by reason but accessed using a knowledge already present in a dormant form and accessible to our intuitive capacity”. Plato called this concept anamnesis.

Ancient Eastern and old Western philosophers intertwined intuition with religion and spirituality. From Hinduism’s Vedic, we get two-fold reasoning for human gut feelings (mana in Sanskrit). First, is imprinting of psychological experiences constructed through sensory information—the mind seeking to become aware of the external world. Second, a natural action when the mind is aware of itself, resulting in humans being awareness of their existence and their environment.

In Buddhism, you’ll find a similar take on intuition. Monks teach that intuition is a faculty in the mind of immediate knowledge that’s beyond the mental process of conscious thinking, as conscious thought cannot necessarily access subconscious information or render such information into a communicable form. Gut feelings, according to Buddhism, are mental states immediately connecting the Universal Mind with your individual, discriminating mind.

More modern-day philosophers, like Descartes, say intuition is “pre-existing knowledge gained through rational reasoning or discovering truth through contemplation that manifests in subconscious messaging.” Descartes goes on to say, “Whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive to be true is true no matter if I see it subconsciously.”

Immanuel Kant offered this: “Intuition consists of basic sensory information provided by the cognitive faculty of sensibility equivalent to what loosely might be called perception through conscious and subconscious.”

In Psychological Types written in 1916 by Carl Jung, you’ll read this: “Intuition is an irrational function, opposed most directly by sensation and less opposed strongly by the rational functions of thinking and feeling. Intuition is perception via the unconscious using sense-perception only as a starting point to bring forward ideas, images, possibilities, ways out of a blocked situation, by a process that is mostly unconscious.”

Freud—always the contrarian—called bullshit on Jung. Freud said, “Knowledge can only be attained through the conscious intellectual manipulation of carefully made observations. I reject any other means of acquiring knowledge such as intuition (gut feelings).”

That’s a short canvassing of philosophers. So, what do the scientists say about gut feelings?

Well, neurologists have a lot to offer about how intuition is biologically tied into the gut. They say our gut, our gastrointestinal (GI) system, has an entire mind of its own called the Enteric Nervous System (ENS) that operates alongside, but independent of, our brain and Central Nervous System (CNS) functions. Our ENS is two layers of more than 100 million nerve cells lining the entire GI system from start to finish—from our esophagus to our anus, or from our yap to our hoop as a layperson might say.

This incredibly complex ENS has a full-time job of regulating our GI tract whose main purpose is to keep us alive through sustainable nutrition. Neurologists say the ENS acts on instinct and constantly exchanges information to our brain through our CNS. When the ENS senses something awry, it immediately alerts the brain that can choose to react consciously or subconsciously.

That works both ways. When the brain consciously or subconsciously alarms, it notifies the ENS which just might explain why you get that feeling in your stomach—that gut feeling. It’s why anxiety can bung you up or make you throw up. In the end, it might be diarrhea that ultimately lets you know to trust your gut feelings.

Okay, that explains the neuroscience behind the ENS gut feeling reaction. But it doesn’t explain what intuition is, and it’s probably worthwhile to look at a definition of intuition which seems to be a different process than a physical gut feeling. Here’s the best differentiating explanation I could find about instinct, gut feeling, and intuition.

Instinct — our innate inclination toward a particular behavior as opposed to a learned response.

Gut Feeling — a hunch or a sensation that appears quickly in consciousness (notable enough to be acted upon if one chooses) without us being fully aware of the underlying reasons for its occurrence.

Intuition — the process giving us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and subconscious parts of our mind, and also between instinct and reason.

If I understand this correctly, gut feelings are short flashes of raw sensory alerts while intuition is a higher-evolved mechanism of subconsciously processing information without stopping to run reams of paper through the mental printer. So, my reasoning goes, intuition must be more of a learned behavior manufactured through experiences, both consciously built and subconsciously retained. Gut feelings, on the other hand, are more instinctive and primal.

I looked around for scientific studies on intuition and found credible works by Daniel Kahneman who won a Nobel Prize for his work on human judgment and decision-making. Without going into detail, Dr. Kahneman and his group conclusively proved there was a valid science behind human intuition which included—not surprisingly—gut feelings.

Another scientific study led by Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer of the Max Plank Institute for Human Development, agreed. Dr. Gigerenzer stated, “People rarely make decisions on the basis of reason alone, especially when the problems faced are complex. I think intuition’s merit has been vastly underappreciated as a form of unconscious intelligence.”

These intuition studies tie into works done by Dr. Gary Klein’s organization at the Natural Decision Making Movement who studied real-life decision processing by people in high-stress situations. They observed police officers, soldiers, paramedics, nurses, and fighter pilots coming to the conclusion that these professionals’ intuitive abilities developed from recognizing regularities, repetitions, and similarities between information available to them combined with their past experiences.

Out of their scientific work of studying intuitive reactions under stressful and challenging situations involving time pressure, uncertainty, unclear goals, and organizational restraints came a fighter pilot training model called the OODA Loop or the Circle of Competence. It’s a simple formula every high-performance jet jockey now memorizes to the point of being instinctive, intuitive, and gut-felt. It goes like this:

O — Observe
O — Orient
D — Decide
A — Act

So, is developed intuition, or its cruder form of visceral gut feeling, reliable? I’d say if it’s good enough to train fighter pilots with then it’s good enough for us. Let’s put it to the test.

I found a terribly non-scientific (but totally fun) click-bait site with a ten-question roll-through called the Queendom Gut Instinct Test. You can take it for a spin here:

https://www.queendom.com/queendom_tests/transfer

To score your results, you have to click the boxes at the site, but don’t worry—there’s no cost involved, and it’s an interesting self-perspective based on your gut reaction answers. These are the ten questions and multiple choice answers:

1. Did you ever get the sense that something was wrong or someone was in danger and ended up being right?
Yes ———  No ———

2. Do you believe that your gut instinct is at least as reliable as your rational mind?
Yes ———  No ———

3. Do you believe that a person can give off good or bad “vibes?”
Yes ———  No ———

4. You’re shopping with your partner for a new home. The real estate agent you’re working with pulls up to a beautiful house in the exact style you are looking for. However, when you walk through the front door, you are suddenly overcome with a sense of dread and foreboding. The place has a really creepy ambiance. What would you do?
A ——— Walk right back out. There is definitely something wrong with this place.
B ——— Ask the agent about the house’s history. If something bad happened here, I am not      buying it.
C ——— Do a tour of the place, since I am here anyway. If I can’t shake the negative feeling       AND there are major structural issues with the house, then I won’t buy it.
D ——— Shake it off. Even if something occurred, my partner and I will fill it with better memories.
F ——— Make an offer. Who cares about the house’s history? This is my dream home!

5. Two weeks before you’re about to go on a trip overseas, you have a recurring dream that the airplane you’re on needs to make an emergency landing due to a technical failure. What would you do?
A ——— Ignore it. It’s just a sign that I am nervous about flying.
B ——— Go on the trip, but say a few prayers or bring my lucky charm.
C ——— Reschedule my flight. There’s obviously a reason why I am having this dream every night.

6. Your friend introduces you to his or her new significant other. From the first conversation, you get the sense that there is something off about this person – like he/she is hiding something, or not being genuine. What would you do?
A ——— Dismiss it as paranoia. I barely know this person, so I have no right to judge him or her so quickly.
B ——— Put the feeling aside for now, but keep an eye out for suspicious behavior.
C ——— Try to probe a bit and/or do some research to see if there is something to my hunch.
D ——— Warn my friend to be careful and not to trust this person too quickly – my gut is never wrong.

7. Time to upgrade your wheels. How would you most likely approach this purchase?
A ——— I would conduct some research, weigh the pros and cons of different models, and then find a car that fits my needs and budget.
B ——— I would do some research on different models, then test drive the car to see how I feel in it.
C ——— I would have a general idea of what I want, but it would come down to one thing: if it’s the right car for me, I will know it when I’m in it.

8. You’re out buying coffee when you come across an old colleague who left the company to start his own business. He had a major fallout with management when he was turned down for a promotion. He says his startup is doing great, and he offers you a job on his team with a lucrative salary as well as benefits. It sounds like an amazing opportunity – but your gut is telling you to turn it down. What would you do?
A ——— Thank him for the offer, but decline. My gut is obviously picking up on something that he’s not telling me.
B ——— Ask him to give me some time to consider the offer, and then do some research on his company to see if it’s doing as well as he says it is.
C ——— Jump on the offer. There is no way I would turn down this amazing chance for a better job!

9. As you’re leaving your friend’s place and walking to your car, you hear a clear voice in your head say, “Don’t drive home. Stay here for the night.” You decide to listen and sleep over. The next morning, you find out that there was a fatal 8-car accident the night before – on the exact road you were planning to take, at the exact time you were about to leave. What would you most likely be thinking?
A ——— “Interesting coincidence.”
B ——— “That’s so strange. Maybe someone is looking out for me.”
C ——— “I am so grateful I listened to that warning in my head.”

10. You’re at a convenience store to pick up a lottery ticket. How do you choose your numbers?
A ——— I let the machine pick them at random.
B ——— I play the same numbers every time.
C ——— I pick the numbers based on what my gut tells me.

Again, you’ll have to take the test at its online site to get your Gut Instinct Score. How did I make out? I got an 85, and here’s what the site said about me:

Your gut instinct has been your ally. It’s that older, wiser friend who always has your back and stops you from making stupid decisions. When your gut tells you to pay attention, to be careful, to not trust someone, or to go right instead of left, you won’t question the information. You are in tune with your intuition. Chances are that on those rare occasions when you didn’t trust your gut, you regretted it. Just keep in mind that your logical reasoning is your ally too. It is not the antagonist to your intuition, it’s simply an additional source of information and a way to process it all. Just as you shouldn’t rely solely on your intuition to make major financial decisions, you also shouldn’t rely on logic alone as a survival mechanism. Make good use of both. When you use analytical reasoning to evaluate a problem and your intuition to pick up on deeper, more hidden sources of information, you’ve got the best of both worlds.

The Gut Instinct Test doesn’t tell you which questions you got “right or wrong”. I think there’s some sort of algorithmic scoring process that gives you a value which is why I got an 85 or an 8.5 out of 10. I know which one I bombed (for sure) and that was the lotto number thing. I always use the machine quick-pick because I’m too lazy to think it out for myself.

How about you DyingWords followers? Do you trust your gut feelings? And if you take the test, how about sharing your results?

CARL SAGAN’S BULLSHIT DETECTION KIT

Carl Sagan was one of the Twentieth Century’s great critical thinkers. His peers called Sagan the patron saint of reason and the master of scientific balance between blind belief, skepticism, questioning, and openness. Carl Sagan had the chops to back it up. He was a cosmologist, astrophysicist, philosopher, humanist, and prolific author as well as being the architect behind SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Sagan was also good at detecting bullshit.

I just read Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It was published in 1996 shortly before Sagan’s untimely death from myelodysplasia. In it, he debunks superstition, some organized religion beliefs, psychics, sorcery, faith healing, UFOs, witchcraft, and demons — especially the fire-breathing dragon in his garage. One of Sagan’s chapters is The Fine Art of Baloney Detection. He was profanity-correct twenty-five years ago. Today, we know he’d call it “Bullshit”.

In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan takes a hard run at paid product endorsements by unscrupulous scientists who “betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers and introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity”. Sagan also predicted the rise of fake news and the down-slide of political ethics and honesty. It made me wonder what he’d say about Trump.

Carl Sagan said that “through their training, scientists are equipped with a baloney (bullshit) detection kit — a set of cognitive tools and techniques that fortify the mind against the penetration of falsehoods”. Here is a list of what’s inside Carl Sagan’s bullshit detection kit:

1. Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”

2. Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.

3. Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

4. Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.

5. Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.

6. Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.

7. If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.

8. Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.

9. Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out. Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.

The Fine Art of Bullshit Detection drills deeper. Carl Sagan writes, “Just as important as learning these helpful tools and techniques, is unlearning and avoiding the most common pitfalls of common sense. In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions”.

Carl Sagan goes on to admonish the most common and perilous pitfalls — many rooted in our chronic discomfort with ambiguity — and he uses examples of each in action.

1. Ad hominem — Latin for “to the man,” attacking the arguer and not the argument (e.g., The Reverend Dr. Smith is a known Biblical fundamentalist, so her objections to evolution need not be taken seriously)

2. Argument from authority (e.g., President Richard Nixon should be re-elected because he has a secret plan to end the war in Southeast Asia — but because it was secret, there was no way for the electorate to evaluate it on its merits; the argument amounted to trusting him because he was President: a mistake, as it turned out)

3. Argument from adverse consequences (e.g., A God meting out punishment and reward must exist, because if He didn’t, society would be much more lawless and dangerous — perhaps even ungovernable. Or: The defendant in a widely publicized murder trial must be found guilty; otherwise, it will be an encouragement for other men to murder their wives)

4. Appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e.g., There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we’re still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

5. Special pleading, often to rescue a proposition in deep rhetorical trouble (e.g., How can a merciful God condemn future generations to torment because, against orders, one woman induced one man to eat an apple? Special plead: you don’t understand the subtle Doctrine of Free Will. Or: How can there be an equally godlike Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the same Person? Special plead: You don’t understand the Divine Mystery of the Trinity. Or: How could God permit the followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — each in their own way enjoined to heroic measures of loving kindness and compassion — to have perpetrated so much cruelty for so long? Special plead: You don’t understand Free Will again. And anyway, God moves in mysterious ways.)

6. Begging the question, also called assuming the answer (e.g., We must institute the death penalty to discourage violent crime. But does the violent crime rate in fact fall when the death penalty is imposed? Or: The stock market fell yesterday because of a technical adjustment and profit-taking by investors — but is there any independent evidence for the causal role of “adjustment” and profit-taking; have we learned anything at all from this purported explanation?)

7. Observational selection, also called the enumeration of favorable circumstances, or as the philosopher Francis Bacon described it, counting the hits and forgetting the misses (e.g., A state boasts of the Presidents it has produced, but is silent on its serial killers) statistics of small numbers — a close relative of observational selection (e.g., “They say 1 out of every 5 people is Chinese. How is this possible? I know hundreds of people, and none of them is Chinese. Yours truly.” Or: “I’ve thrown three sevens in a row. Tonight I can’t lose.”)

8. Misunderstanding of the nature of statistics (e.g., President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);

9. Inconsistency (e.g., Prudently plan for the worst of which a potential military adversary is capable, but thriftily ignore scientific projections on environmental dangers because they’re not “proved.” Or: Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism. Or: Consider it reasonable for the Universe to continue to exist forever into the future, but judge absurd the possibility that it has infinite duration into the past);

10. Non sequitur — Latin for “It doesn’t follow” (e.g., Our nation will prevail because God is great. But nearly every nation pretends this to be true; the German formulation was “Gott mit uns”). Often those falling into the non sequitur fallacy have simply failed to recognize alternative possibilities;

11. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc — Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by” (e.g., Jaime Cardinal Sin, Archbishop of Manila: “I know of … a 26-year-old who looks 60 because she takes [contraceptive] pills.” Or: Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons)

12. Meaningless question (e.g., What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? But if there is such a thing as an irresistible force there can be no immovable objects, and vice versa)

13. Excluded middle, or false dichotomy — considering only the two extremes in a continuum of intermediate possibilities (e.g., “Sure, take his side; my husband’s perfect; I’m always wrong.” Or: “Either you love your country or you hate it.” Or: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”)

14. Short-term vs. long-term — a subset of the excluded middle, but so important I’ve pulled it out for special attention (e.g., We can’t afford programs to feed malnourished children and educate pre-school kids. We need to urgently deal with crime on the streets. Or: Why explore space or pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?);

15. Slippery slope, related to excluded middle (e.g., If we allow abortion in the first weeks of pregnancy, it will be impossible to prevent the killing of a full-term infant. Or, conversely: If the state prohibits abortion even in the ninth month, it will soon be telling us what to do with our bodies around the time of conception);

16. Confusion of correlation and causation (e.g., A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay. Or: Andean earthquakes are correlated with closest approaches of the planet Uranus; therefore — despite the absence of any such correlation for the nearer, more massive planet Jupiter — the latter causes the former)

17. Straw man — caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack (e.g., Scientists suppose that living things simply fell together by chance — a formulation that willfully ignores the central Darwinian insight, that Nature ratchets up by saving what works and discarding what doesn’t. Or — this is also a short-term/long-term fallacy — environmentalists care more for snail darters and spotted owls than they do for people)

18. Suppressed evidence, or half-truths (e.g., An amazingly accurate and widely quoted “prophecy” of the assassination attempt on President Reagan is shown on television; but — an important detail — was it recorded before or after the event? Or: These government abuses demand revolution, even if you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Yes, but is this likely to be a revolution in which far more people are killed than under the previous regime? What does the experience of other revolutions suggest? Are all revolutions against oppressive regimes desirable and in the interests of the people?)

19. Weasel words (e.g., The separation of powers of the U.S. Constitution specifies that the United States may not conduct a war without a declaration by Congress. On the other hand, Presidents are given control of foreign policy and the conduct of wars, which are potentially powerful tools for getting themselves re-elected. Presidents of either political party may therefore be tempted to arrange wars while waving the flag and calling the wars something else — “police actions,” “armed incursions,” “protective reaction strikes,” “pacification,” “safeguarding American interests,” and a wide variety of “operations,” such as “Operation Just Cause.” Euphemisms for war are one of a broad class of reinventions of language for political purposes. Talleyrand said, “An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public”)

Carl Sagan ends the chapter with a necessary disclaimer:

“Like all tools, the baloney (bullshit) detection kit can be misused, applied out of context, or even employed as a rote alternative to thinking. But applied judiciously, it can make all the difference in the world — not least in evaluating our own arguments before we present them to others.

 

WHY IT TAKES SO LONG TO MAKE A CORONAVIRUS VACCINE

We wish it would just go away—this stupid Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. You’d think with today’s medical knowledge and advanced technology all it would take is leading scientists around the world to come together, snap their fingers, and immediately slop-out an effective vaccine. Then, we could get back to the “Old Normal”.

Not so fast. There’s nothing quick or easy about making an effective Covid-19/Coronavirus inoculation.

When this thing started, I wrote a post titled Just How Deadly is Novel Coronavirus and Covid-19? Like a lot of pieces, I looked for an intriguing subject, researched it to understand the basics, then wrote it to share with others. Creating a Coronavirus/Covid-19 vaccine is an evolving issue, and I wanted to know more about how long it will be before a preventive treatment is widely available.

An article on my HuffPost feed satisfied my curiosity, and it’ll inform you, too, about when we can expect an effective coronavirus vaccine. Unfortunately, the answer is no time soon. There are good reasons why it takes so long to make a vaccine. Rather than writing new content about this complicated issue, I’m sharing what I received from the Huff.

—   —   —

As of the end of April, 2020, the World Health Organization was tracking 71 coronavirus vaccines in preclinical trials, with five additional candidates already in clinical trials. Given how recently the COVID-19 pandemic began spreading, it might seem promising that there’s already a lot of activity on the immunization front.

With so many potential vaccines in testing, you also may wonder why medical experts say it will take at least 12 to 18 months before one is ready to go. If a coronavirus vaccine did make it to market on such a timetable, it would actually be the fastest turnaround in history. Currently, that record belongs to the mumps vaccine, which was approved for use in just four years back in the 1960s. For Ebola, a vaccine took five years to develop.

More commonly, the development of a vaccine takes eight to 10 years. Can a COVID-19 vaccine be created any faster? There’s certainly hope, but no certainty.

“I’d say the 12 to 18 months that’s been bandied about by some experts is realistic, but it’s [also] optimistic,” said James Cutrell, director of the infectious disease fellowship program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “It is based on the assumption that each phase of trials goes according to plan, with an optimistic time frame at each of those stages.”

Here’s what goes into each phase of developing a vaccine.

We often think of vaccines as treatments for illness, but they’re not exactly that, said Kelvin Lee, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware and director of the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals. Vaccines are given to people who are well to keep them from getting sick.

“It’s very different from developing medicine where someone is ill and you are trying to make them better. In a healthy population, you don’t want the vaccine to have negative consequences,” he said.

First, Lee said, researchers will study the virus and attempt to determine which type of vaccine may work best.

Microscopic view of Coronavirus, a pathogen that attacks the respiratory tract.

There are several kinds of vaccines. Some have a tiny, weakened bit of live virus, which triggers a protective immune response in your body but does not cause the actual illness. Some contain inactive virus that creates a similar response in the body. And some utilize genetically engineered RNA or DNA, which carries “directions” to make the type of protein that can prevent the virus from binding to our cells and making us ill.

Once researchers decide which vaccine route they think will work best, they get to testing.

“This is where time really comes into play,” Lee said. “Even after you do lab tests to make sure it works in the proverbial petri dish, in many cases vaccines will undergo tests in animals to ensure that it’s going to be safe for humans and has the desired response. And then, where it really starts to take time is in the human clinical trials.”

To roll out a vaccine requires a lot of safety testing. During Phase 1, researchers take a small number of healthy volunteers and test the vaccine for serious side effects, Cutrell explained.

Phase 2 involves smaller studies looking at efficacy, he said. This includes figuring out the best dosage of the vaccine, the scheduling of dosages if you need multiple ones, and more. Scientists will consider whether the vaccine still appears safe enough and whether the immune response or antibody buildup is great enough to warrant moving on to additional clinical studies.

In Phase 3, you will see larger field studies.

“You would take a susceptible population, vaccinate some while having a control group, and monitor the effect over time and see if there’s any difficulty,” Cutrell said.

Here, researchers may look for common, short-term side effects and at what dosages those side effects pop up.

“All that has to be done first, and then if Phase 3 shows the vaccine is safe and effective, that’s when you’d look at licensing,” Cutrell said.

Even after you have a working vaccine approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it still takes time to mass-produce and distribute it across the country.

The goal is to vaccinate huge numbers of people, “so you then develop immunity in the community that would protect against larger outbreaks,” Cutrell said.

Testing and monitoring ― essentially Phase 4 ― continue even after the vaccine is generally available because it takes time to ensure safety, Lee said. “You don’t know if something bad is going to happen a month later, two months later, a year later.”

Common side effects of vaccines include redness and pain at the site of injection and maybe a low-grade fever; side effects like seizures or allergic reactions are extremely rare. But the bottom line is that scientists and doctors aim to develop a vaccine where the protective benefits far outweigh the risks.

While it’s hard to say when researchers will have a viable vaccine, there are a few factors that could speed up the timeline for this coronavirus vaccine. Traditional approaches to creating vaccines ― like the use of chicken eggs ― are proven but not necessarily speedy.

“You have some newer technologies that some companies are trying to leverage, where they were already prepared to respond to a pandemic,” said Lee. “You can shorten some of that discovery and early development timeline.”

Newer biotechnology-based methods, sometimes called “cell culture methods,” could make for more rapid development, he said. Additionally, with a pandemic circling the world, American researchers are hardly alone.

“You’ve got private companies and scientists trying to work together on the vaccine. That collaboration can certainly help accelerate the timeline,” Lee said. “Scientists will still want to minimize risks and ensure the safest possible rollout of a vaccine. “But given the outbreak globally and the impact it’s having, I can imagine there are ways to design trials to accelerate testing,”

There could also be an unconventional study design for the coronavirus vaccine, according to a new report published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. In place of traditional Phase 3 trials, volunteers at low risk of developing a severe form of COVID-19 ― healthy people without chronic conditions in their 20s, for instance ― might opt in for a “human challenge study.” They could be exposed to the coronavirus, monitored closely and given the best care.

This type of study would involve fewer participants and could be done in less time than a traditional Phase 3. Of course, the idea would need to be rigorously discussed beforehand as ethics rules generally forbid deliberately infecting human beings with a serious disease.

Besides vaccine trials, researchers are testing potential treatments for COVID-19. Instead of preventing the disease, these aim to make sick people well again.

“One of the treatments that has gotten a lot of attention is remdesivir, but the data available so far is fairly limited,” Cutrell said. No trials comparing use of the antiviral drug against a control group have been published so far. That said, studies are coming, including a National Institutes of Health clinical trial comparing remdesivir against a placebo.

There are also drugs that could potentially address the immune system’s response to the virus.

“A lot of times patients with this virus get sicker in the second week of their illness ― and it’s not the virus, but the immune system that makes them get quite sick,” Cutrell said. “They experience an exaggerated state of inflammation or ‘cytokine storm.’”

Some drugs that might dampen the immune system’s effects are currently in clinical trials. Then there’s the now-controversial drug hydroxychloroquine, which has long been used for malaria or inflammatory conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or lupus. Although the drug received a lot of early attention, the studies showing potential benefits for COVID-19 patients have been mostly anecdotal with no control groups to compare against.

“There are also concerns about safety, including cardiac issues and arrhythmias that give doctors pause,” Cutrell said, noting that the FDA recently advised Americans not to use hydroxychloroquine outside of a hospital setting.

Finally, COVID-19 might be treatable with convalescent plasma.

“This is where people who have had the disease and recovered donate plasma, and that plasma is given to someone with an active stage of disease,” Cutrell explained.

The antibodies and proteins in that plasma could potentially help someone with COVID-19 recover. (You may be able to donate plasma if you have recovered from the coronavirus.)

Until we have a vaccine or meaningful treatment, we need to proceed with caution, ramp up testing and isolate the sick quickly if we hope to get back to some “semblance of normalcy,” Cutrell said.

“In my opinion, before we have effective treatment or vaccine, we will have to behave similarly to South Korea, Singapore or Hong Kong, with widespread access to testing, contact tracing and isolation, quarantining people in cases of potential contact,” he said. “In doing this, they’ve been able to stave off having large scale epidemics in their country and are allowed to be a little more open than other places where those things are not in place.”

“Of course, those countries have not yet seen second waves of the virus.”

“That approach requires constant vigilance,” Cutrell acknowledged. But even as scientists and doctors work to develop effective treatments and a vaccine, he said “thoughtful and incremental” strategies can help us move forward to “a period of more normal activities.”

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Note from the HuffPost: Experts are still learning about the novel coronavirus. The information in this story is what was known or available as of the end of April, 2020, but it’s possible guidance around COVID-19 could change as scientists discover more about the virus. Please check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the most updated recommendations.

Here’s the link to my first DyingWords post titled Just How Deadly is Novel Coronavirus and Covid-19?