Coronavirus Vaccine: The New Holy Grail?

The world has a choice, develop herd immunity and let COVID19 run its course. Leaving the world with a massive body count. With few escaping the loss of a friend or a family member. OR… The human race searches for the 21^st Century holy grail. A vaccine, that can be distributed on a massive scale to save a significant amount of humanity. Obviously, the latter is more attractive, so how are we doing on our quest?

The race for a COVID19 vaccine is on! I better kick off with a word of caution, the development of a safe vaccine for a new illness like COVID19, can take up to 18 months to get to us. That’s with accelerated approval and research moving at unprecedented speed. Saying that, the first COVID-cure-off-the-rank, of course looks like coming from China. This vaccine is being developed by two giant Chinese pharmaceutical companies and it has just completed a second phase of testing. They say it might be ready to go to market by the end of 2020, which is astonishing. In fact, five Chinese vaccines are currently being tested on humans, the most in any country.

100 vaccines, 1 virus? Of course, drug makers the world over are frantically trying to find a cure for Coronavirus, which has sent at least 365,000 of us to early graves. More than 100 vaccines are currently being developed globally but only a handful have made it the human clinical trial stage. Clinical testing as I understand it consists of three stages: Stage 1 involves a few dozen healthy volunteers. Stage 2 expands this number to several hundred in an outbreak area. Stage 3 repeats the experiment with several thousand people.

A Vaccine needs to… teach a person’s immune system to recognise and fend off COVID19 before an infection takes hold. This would have many benefits, with the inoculated going back to work and ceasing to self-isolate at home. Life could go back to a ‘new normal’ and President Trump and Prime Ministers Johnson and Morrison would be extremely happy and relieved men. The only problem is it’s impossible to know right away if a vaccine has worked or not. Researchers have to wait for participants to encounter the real virus out in the real world. Which if people are still sheltering at home or an outbreak has ended, can take a very long time.

The U.S. and U.K. join the race. In the States, a pharma company has got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration, to progress its vaccine to Stage 2 trials. These will involve 600 participants and is designed to assess if the vaccine can induce immune systems to produce antibodies. In the U.K. another pharma company, got the drop on its rivals by acquiring data from human trials of similar vaccines for related virus’s such as MERS, (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome). Because of this, they got British regulators to push forward with a large Stage 2 study involving 6,000 people, while the outbreak was raging across the U.K. Their vaccine is based on technology that tricks the body into triggering an immune response.

And now the really bad news. Assuming everything goes well in various trials around the globe and we have a winning vaccine, there’s still the question of manufacture and distribution. The huge demand from a COVID19 ravaged world, will be astronomical. Getting it to where it’s needed won’t happen overnight and you can bet your boots the politicians will get involved. It’s also likely that more than one stage of vaccination will be needed to achieve immunity. All in all, the holy grail of a COVID19 vaccine, is going to take time to find. Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news, you can stone me later.