As you should be able to tell from context
Make you a deal- when you start caring about
my context, I'll care about yours.
re: Vaccine production, the Mario Bros streamer CarlSagan42 is a PHD researcher into plant-based vaccine production. It's not ready yet, but from what he's said, it will be easier and cheaper to produce the vaccines and it'll be allergen free... speed-wise, I'm not sure he's talked about that.
Starts at roughly 24:30
He doesn't go into great detail (and note- he's not vaccine focused, he's genegineering focused, so it's no surprise- plus, as is common in any industry, it's easy to forget most people don't know what you know) is that plant vaccines are a very different system than animal vaccines.
Vaccination works by prompting the animal immune system (humans, usually) to generate its own proper antibodies. Which means you have to expose said animal to the virus (or certain environmental bacteria like tetanus, but antibiotics are the preferred method with most bacteria) and let nature do her thing and create antibodies. There are, in effect, two methods to make that happen.
The first- what is the technical definition of a vaccine- is to expose the body to the virus (or a very similar virus- the use of the mostly harmless to humans cowpox virus was our first big break in vaccinating against smallpox, as an example) after damaging, killing, or otherwise rendering it harmless. Live vaccines are increasingly unpopular because of the inherent risk, so those are rare these days.
This is the primary method because it's real easy to do (the basic tech is pushing two centuries old, now) and is guaranteed to work against the vast majority of viruses... exceptions mainly being diseases that have ways to actively fuck with the immune system (most forms of herpes- including chickenpox), mutate too fast to pin down (rhinovirus), and those which other animal immune systems aren't any better at fighting than ours (rabies). HIV is a special pain in the ass because it's all three.
The other main method is to synthesize a protein resembling a virus which tricks our immune system into making antibodies that work on said virus, and let it do the work. The main weakness is that it's difficult to predict the outcome and you require a very thorough understanding of the underlying mechanisms of that specific virus (once again, HIV resists classification). The technology to make these sorts of vaccines is very new, and the library of diseases they work on is still quite limited.
The advantage of this method- when it works- is that it's very cheap and reliable, has less risk of adverse reactions, and you don't need to cultivate the disease you're trying to eradicate in order to produce the cure. It's like a cook book... once the proper recipe is in the medical database, it's available to anyone with the equipment anywhere in the world.
And it's not hard to believe that at some future point,
every human pathogen will be in that database. Personally doubt it'll be in our lifetimes, but I would like to be proven wrong.
With plant vaccines... you only have access to the latter vaccine type. Which means in order to deploy them you first have to identify the perfected protein (which requires *massive* research with no guarantee of success), then genetically modify the vaccine plant to produce that one protein (also no guarantee of success).
That said- when they finally get it working, it will be *magic*. Chances are good plant vaccines will be absurdly cheap, easy to transport, require only the labwork in order to cultivate and ship the origin plants (at which point, any hydroponics garden can do the rest), be orders of magnitude easier to store (big problem with all vaccines- they have a pathetic shelf life), and there's reason to believe most of them would be *edible*.
That's right... in the future, the cure to rabies and ebola could be in the form of children's chewable vitamins. And cost about the same.
Buuut... we've got a few decades to wait for that point. As of right now, the cultivation method is often the only method. Especially for mutative viruses like influenza or novel diseases like the Wuhan virus.
