Pt 1
by
Nick Nunes
There’s a lot to unpack about the COVID-19 vaccines. One of the main concerns about the vaccine has been the expediency with which it has been created and rolled out. Regardless of that notion of doubt or despair, the technology and fevered innovation of the human race, especially under duress, should never be underestimated.
National Geographic published an article in April of 2020 that stated, “Vaccines stop outbreaks before they run amok, as evidenced by more than two centuries of using the medical technology to successfully battle foes including measles and influenza.”
Their article went on to assert, “while public officials and news reports were quick to cite this as a record-breaking development, the biotechnology underlying this drug has existed for nearly 30 years, and it has never yielded a working vaccine for any human disease”.
The subsequent claim that, “the world won’t have a coronavirus vaccine for more than a year, probably longer”, has proved quite foolhardy as four types of vaccines have been approved, in varying degrees by varying agencies and governments.
The folly in deriding the potential of finding a vaccine may come from cautionary doubt, which can be prudent.
However, they also state, “The mumps vaccine—considered the fastest ever approved—took four years to go from collecting viral samples to licensing a drug in 1967.” This is a comparison of scientific innovation over half a century old.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “Typically, many vaccine candidates will be evaluated before any are found to be both safe and effective. For example, of all the vaccines that are studied in the lab and laboratory animals, roughly seven out of every 100 will be considered good enough to move into clinical trials in humans. Of the vaccines that do make it to clinical trials, just one in five is successful. Having lots of different vaccines in development increases the chances that there will be one or more successful vaccines that will be shown to be safe and efficacious for the intended prioritised populations.”
The vaccinations that Barbados has received from India were developed by a team from the University of Oxford. According to the University’s website, “The Oxford COVID-19 vaccine team is led by Prof. Sarah Gilbert, Prof Andrew Pollard, Prof. Teresa Lambe, Dr Sandy Douglas, Prof. Catherine Green and Prof. Adrian Hill. Their team includes scientists from both the Jenner Institute and the Oxford Vaccine Group, who bring together decades of internationally recognised experience in vaccine research, including responding to the Ebola outbreak of 2014.”
Oxford goes on to assert, “The teams had already used ChAdOx1 vaccine technology to produce candidate vaccines against a number of pathogens including flu, Zika and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), another coronavirus.”
The rapidity of and proliferation of vaccines that have been created in the wake of the emergence of the novel coronavirus from the end of 2019 speaks to the urgency of the issue at hand. Just over a year after the emergence of this new virus, more than 100 million people have been infected across the globe.
The need for a concerted effort in vaccine creation has been funded and concentrated, as never before in history, from every sector. At the very end of 2020, more than 200 vaccine candidates were in development with at least 52 already in human trials.
There are three main approaches to the development of vaccines—using a whole virus or bacterium, using parts that trigger the immune system, and using just the genetic material.
The whole-microbe of creating a vaccine can be approached in three ways—
• An inactivated vaccine is made by taking the disease carrying virus or bacterium and killing it. This is the way influenza and polio vaccines are made.
• A live-attenuated vaccine uses a weakened version of the virus to prompt immune response. This is the way MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), chickenpox, and shingles vaccines are created.
• A viral vector vaccine uses a safe virus to deliver specific sub-parts of the offending germ to trigger an immune response without the potential to cause the disease. This is the way the Ebola vaccine was developed.
The subunit approach to vaccine creation only uses very specific parts of a virus or bacterium, the ones an immune system requires to recognise for a response. According to WHO, the subunits may be proteins or sugars and most of the vaccines on the childhood schedule are subunit vaccines. These vaccines protect against whooping cough, tetanus, diphtheria, and meningococcal meningitis.
Creating vaccines through the genetic approach results in what is referred to as nucleic acid vaccines. Unlike vaccines created from microbes that are either whole-dead, weakened, or just parts of the microbe, nucleic acid vaccines just use a section of their genetic material to create instructions. WHO asserts that, “A nucleic acid vaccine delivers a specific set of instructions to our cells, either as DNA or mRNA, for them to make the specific protein that we want our immune system to recognise and respond to.”
However, WHO goes on to inform that, “The nucleic acid approach is a new way of developing vaccines. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, none had yet been through the full approvals process for use in humans, though some DNA vaccines, including for particular cancers, were undergoing human trials. Because of the pandemic, research in this area has progressed very fast and some mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are getting emergency use authorisation, which means they can now be given to people beyond using them only in clinical trials.”
The two vaccines from China, Sinopharm and Sinovac, are whole virus vaccines. Sinopharm purports an efficacy of 79 per cent, while Sinovac has not released an official efficacy but partners report ranges from 50 to 91 per cent.
Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are both mRNA vaccines that have reported similar efficacies of around 95 per cent.
The Novovax vaccine has reported an efficacy of 89 per cent and is a protein subunit vaccine while Johnson & Johnson’s new contender is viral vectored vaccine has been reported at 85 per cent.
