 The development of safe and effective vaccines is challenging and time consuming, but a distributed development approach can accelerate the process by integrating expert groups with relevant vaccine platforms, preclinical models, assays, skills, and knowledge into a single end-to-end development team. This strategy has been used to generate vaccine candidates for emerging viral diseases, including Q fever, which is caused by coxiella burnetii and requires months of antibiotics for treatment. The current vaccine for Q fever is only approved in Australia and requires pre-screening due to potential severe reactogenicity in previously exposed individuals. To address these challenges, a distributed development consortium called Qvaccelerate has been established to develop a new vaccine to prevent Q fever. This article was authored by Patrick M Reeves, Susan Rajupal, Annie Sleder, and others.