Vaccines: design, trials and approval

German has two verbs where English makes do with one, and the difference lies in what ends up as the object. Impfen takes the person: Wir impfen Kinder, sie ist geimpft. Verimpfen takes the vaccine: Die Praxis hat alle Dosen verimpft means that every dose has gone into an arm and none is left in the fridge. That is what the prefix ver- often does to a verb of handling: it moves attention from whoever receives something to the material that is consumed, as in Futter verfüttern or Holz verheizen. So a report saying Es wurden weniger Dosen verimpft als geliefert is counting stock rather than people, and nobody writes Kinder verimpfen. The rest of the list follows a vaccine from the laboratory through the trial to approval and beyond, and its long compounds are read from the end: die Zulassungsstudie is a study, the kind that leads to approval.