From the Associated Press today:

Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday
By ZEKE MILLER
an hour ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first participant in a clinical trial for a vaccine to protect against the new coronavirus will receive an experimental dose on Monday, according to a government official.

The National Institutes of Health is funding the trial, which is taking place at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The official who disclosed plans for the first participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the move has not been publicly announced.

Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine.

Testing will begin with 45 young, healthy volunteers with different doses of shots co-developed by NIH and Moderna Inc. There’s no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because they don’t contain the virus itself. The goal is purely to check that the vaccines show no worrisome side effects, setting the stage for larger tests.

Dozens of research groups around the world are racing to create a vaccine as COVID-19 cases continue to grow. Importantly, they’re pursuing different types of vaccines — shots developed from new technologies that not only are faster to produce than traditional inoculations but might prove more potent. Some researchers even aim for temporary vaccines, such as shots that might guard people’s health a month or two at a time while longer-lasting protection is developed. …

There are a whole bunch of different ways to come up with a vaccine, so trying them all makes sense.

Even if initial safety tests go well, “you’re talking about a year to a year and a half” before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

From the KOMO in Seattle on March 5th:

Kaiser Permanente recruits volunteers for 1st coronavirus vaccine trials
by Karina Mazhukhina | KOMO News Thursday, March 5th 2020
AA

SEATTLE – As Washington state grapples with coronavirus, one Seattle research institute is taking matters into their own hands.

Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute got the OK to begin its vaccine trials, the first of its kind. Its research team is enrolling 45 healthy people, ages 18 to 55, from the Seattle-area over the course of 14 months.

“[The trial] does not include any form of the live virus, and the trial will not expose participants to the virus,” said Rebecca Hughes, senior media consultant with Kaiser Permanente.

The trial is part one of three-phases that will study the safety of the vaccine and how well the immune system responds to it. …

Participants will receive $100 for each of the in-person study visits. People who complete every visit will get $1,100.

So it apparently took about 11 days between the public announcement of recruitment of volunteers and the beginning of the tests. One question would be whether higher compensation could cut, say, a week from that process in the future? Was recruitment immediate or did it take a week or more to find enough volunteers?

This isn’t a time to penny-pinch on paying volunteers.