Updates on COVID-19 Vaccine


I found these two articles on the attempts at a COVID-19 vaccine both informative and depressing. The first one was by Sarah Zhang:
“Nearly five months into the pandemic, all hopes of extinguishing COVID-19 are riding on a still-hypothetical vaccine.”
But, as she writes, there would be so many challenges, even when we have a vaccine. Starting from things as basic as the glass vials to store it in. To the speed at which it can be rolled out. Consider the storage and transport challenges if the vaccine needs to be stored at very low temperautes. And that’s assuming we can even manufacture it on the needed scale in the first place.

Graeme Wood points out the technology of some of the promising vaccine candidates are based on new technology: they’re RNA vaccines. Huh? Normal vaccines are protein vaccines whereas the COVID-19 candidates?
“An RNA vaccine injects instructions to your cells, and hopes that your cells receive these instructions and follow them, and build the proteins that will teach your immune system to fight a virus.”
The problems with RNA vaccines? We’ve never had much success with them in the past. Plus, RNA is super-fragile and has to be shielded.

Other issues arise because this is a respiratory virus. Whereas normal vaccines are injected into muscle, a respiratory virus enters differently, says Zhang:
“Respiratory viruses don’t normally fling themselves into muscle… They usually sneak in through the mucous membranes of the nose and throat. Although vaccine shots induce antibodies in the blood, they don’t induce many in the mucous membranes, meaning they’re unlikely to prevent the virus from entering the body.”
So is any virus going to be useless than? Not entirely:
“They could still protect tissues deeper in the body such as the lungs, thus keeping an infection from getting worse.”
Just don’t expect it to be a magic bullet:
“A COVID-19 vaccine is unlikely to achieve what scientists call “sterilizing immunity,” which prevents disease altogether.”

Then there’s the question of how long will it take for a vaccine to be tested?
“Vaccine makers need to enroll tens of thousands of people to confirm efficacy and to look for rare and long-term side effects. It will take time to recruit participants, time to wait for them to be naturally exposed to COVID-19, time for any long-term side effects to show up, and time to simply analyze all of the data.”

Like I said, it’s informative… and depressing.

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