When Will a Vaccine Be Ready?
Hello! Welcome to another edition of Inside The Newsroom where today we’ll explore how long it could take for a vaccine to be developed for Covid-19, and the recent history of pandemic vaccines. Even with billions of funding poured into the smartest scientists and most advanced technology in the world, the complexity of developing a remedy and the time it takes to test to make sure it’s safe, it could be years before we have a full vaccine ready. So we’ll see what can be done, if anything, to protect us from the deadliest virus in decades.
Before we get started, friend of ITN Francesco Marconi will be appearing on the podcast for a second time to take part in a live Q&A episode on the future of journalism and artificial intelligence. We received so much positive feedback from his appearance earlier this month that we had to get him back on. Francesco’s Q&A session will take place on June 4 (time tbc), so put it in your diary and listen to his podcast from a couple of weeks ago as homework. Enjoy 🤓
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How Close is a Covid-19 Vaccine?
While vaccines often take years to develop, the scale of disruption Covid-19 has caused has made the race to find a vaccine something not seen in our lifetimes. Months after the first case was detected, now thought to be in November of last year, more than 100 vaccines are in development with 10 being trialed on humans. U.S. company Moderna announced it has evidence that its experimental vaccine can train people’s immune systems to fight the latest coronavirus, with the first eight people tested showing detectable antibodies in their bodies.
Elsewhere in the UK, a team at Oxford University has begun a trial on more than 800 people for a vaccine developed in less than three months. Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at the Jenner Institute who led the pre-clinical research, said she has a high degree of confidence in the vaccine working. These are welcome signs, but another scientist on the project has warned that their efforts might be for null due to the rapid decline of the virus. Much-needed larger trials are due to start in July, but intense public and government pressure to find a vaccine could mean that corners are skipped to meet the end of 2020 target set by the U.S.
Below are the 10 candidate vaccines in clinical evaluation, and the 114 at the preclinical stage, according to the World Health Organization:
Non-replicating viral vector vaccine from CanSino (China)
RNA vaccine from Moderna (USA)
Inactivated vaccine from Wuhan Institute of Biological Products (China)
Inactivated vaccine from Beijing Institute of Biological Products (China)
Inactivated vaccine from Sinovac (China)
Non-replicating viral vector vaccine from Oxford University and AstraZeneca (UK)
Protein subunit vaccine from Novavax (US)
RNA vaccine from BioNTech and Pfizer (Germany/USA)
DNA vaccine from Inovio (US)
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How is a Vaccine Even Developed?
Talk about vaccines being developed in record time is nice, but it’s important to know how a vaccine is even made in the first place. Vaccines expose our immune systems to new viruses to allow them to recognize the threat and learn how to fight it. Vaccines can be made in multiple ways. One of which is how the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps and rubella) is implemented, which uses weakened versions of each of the viruses that aren’t strong enough to spark full-blown infections. Annual flu injections are made up of the three most common strands of the influenza making the rounds that flu season, based on testing data coordinated by the WHO.
Because we know the genetic code for the new coronavirus — Sars-CoV-2 — scientists have the entire blueprint for building a vaccine for it, allowing a newer “plug and play” approach, whereby scientists can use different RNA and DNA to find the right match for a vaccine. Thanks to our talented friends at the BBC, below is a diagram of how exactly a vaccine could work to defeat Covid-19. But as we’ll learn, it could be years, if not decades, before a safe and effective vaccine is developed, if at all.
Credit: BBC 👇
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Pandemics That Changed History🤒
A Brief History of Vaccines
As we’ve discussed, much of the world is drunk on cool aid that a vaccine is definitely coming, but history tells us with the likes of HIV/AIDS, Sars and Mers, there’s absolutely no guarantee a vaccine will ever be found for Covid-19. For Dengue fever, it took only 76 years for the first vaccine to be approved. And the families of the 400,000 people that die annually from malaria will tell you first hand that a vaccine doesn’t always stop people from leaving this earth too early.
Let’s start with HIV/AIDS, which was first broke out in the early 1980s and has killed an estimated 32 million people since. Around 38 million people were living with the disease by the end of 2018, and about 770,000 people died from the disease in the same year. Despite the huge numbers of people infected by HIV each year, no vaccine has been found almost four decades after the disease became a pandemic. Several reasons explain why scientists can’t develop an effective vaccine, according to Healthline, including our immune systems being blind to HIV, vaccines typically mimic the immune reaction of recoveries yet a tiny percentage of people have ever recovered from the disease, and the speed at which HIV mutates in the body makes it so difficult for scientists to keep up with.
Covid-19 isn’t the first coronavirus — a large family of viruses that cause mild to severe upper-respiratory tract illnesses — pandemic, and is actually the third of its kind to make the ‘spillover’ from animals to humans in the past couple of decades. The Sars outbreak of 2002 and Mers in 2012 mean scientists have a head start in developing a vaccine for Covid, though there’s still a helluva lot to learn and do for a safe and effective vaccine to be developed. Again, part of that reason is because as time goes on and viruses make their way through different bodies, they mutate by acquiring different elements from other diseases that can make them even stronger and more infectious. So until any form of vaccine or remedy is developed for Covid-19, remaining vigilant and smart is essential — Dr. Levitt.
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