Coronavirus vaccine: when do you get the vaccine? | World News

WDo chickens get the Covid-19 vaccine? Public scientists, such as Sir Patrick Valence, UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor and Anthony Forch, a US correspondent, have repeated that this is not likely to be 12 to 18 months ago. But other voices-including some of those who are participating in the competition to create vaccines themselves- was suggested May be as early as June. Who is right?

The former is probably the case, but this pandemic is complicated because the new vaccine is changing at almost every stage of the process of reaching the needles near us.

“It really depends on what you mean by having a vaccine,” says Management Sciences, a global non-profit organization based in Massachusetts that aims to build a resilient healthcare system. said Marian Wentworth, president and CEO of for Health. Long-term observer of vaccine development. “It means something that can be used in a mass vaccination campaign, and if we can all continue our lives, perhaps 12-18 months would be appropriate.”

However, with regard to vaccines that are deemed safe and effective enough to be deployed in a more limited manner-to high-risk groups such as healthcare professionals-it is likely that drug Authorities and the World Health Organization in the recent Ebola situation in Africa.

Adrian Hill at Oxford University Told the guardian His group’s Covid-19 vaccine candidate was likely to be ready by summer. Perhaps he was referring to such a preparation. This group, led by Sara Gilbert, Said Vaccines that have been shown to be effective in high-volume Phase 3 clinical trials, even in best-case scenarios, will not be ready by autumn. And the scenario is “very ambitious and subject to change.”

Vaccines are usually developed in the lab before being tested in animals. If it turns out to be safe and produces a promising immune response at this preclinical stage, it goes into human or clinical trials. These are divided into three phases. Each phase takes longer than before and involves more people. Phase 1 establishes vaccine safety in a small group of healthy individuals with the goal of eliminating debilitating side effects. The effectiveness of phase 2 and 3 trials, and current outbreaks, will be conducted in places where the disease is endemic. In parallel with these later phases, the production capacity of candidate vaccines is gradually increased, and factories can produce them on a large scale if regulators determine that they need to be licensed.

so paper Was announced on New England Medical Journal On March 30, a representative of the Oslo-based not-for-profit Epidemiological Innovation Innovation Union (Cepi), which is helping to finance and coordinate the development of the Covid-19 vaccine, announced an accelerated version of this process. Suitable for pandemic. In this “pandemic paradigm,” certain steps, such as animal and phase 1 clinical trials, are performed in parallel. This includes expanding production capacity before sufficient safety and efficacy data are available. This is a financially risky step, as it may not be feasible, and the government and non-profit organizations such as Cepi need to share that additional financial risk. Pharmaceutical companies if they want to engage. Mass production is important in pandemics, where billions, if not billions, of doses are needed, and many countries are currently struggling to build new vaccine manufacturing facilities.

“People now acknowledge that the long process of traditional licensing of vaccines is useless in epidemic situations,” says Beate Kampman, head of the London Health and Tropical Medicine vaccine center.

Carefully, Cepi did not attach a timeline to its accelerated paradigm, but estimates of 12 to 18 months have already taken that into account. It has taken the past 10 to 20 years to bring a new vaccine to the clinic. Nevertheless, the acceleration paradigm is currently implemented. Just 16 weeks after the first gene sequence for the disease-causing virus Sars-CoV-2 was released March 16, Boston-based biotechnology company Modelna said that We confirmed that the vaccine participated in human tests. Others continue shortly.

“We reach the candidate much sooner,” says Kampman, who put this progress on the progress made in the fight against Ebola. “The improvements in technology seen over the last five years have really made a difference.”

However, there are many hurdles in the future. Most of the 50 odd Covid-19 vaccine candidates under development and testing do not reach the licensing stage. The fastest vaccine candidate in the block can cause problems later. Moderna’s innovative Technology It has made it possible to generate candidates quickly, but vaccines using this platform have not been licensed to date.

Meanwhile, at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, the Covid-19 vaccine candidate is still in preclinical development, but is taking advantage of established technology (approved measles vaccine), so the testing and licensing process is It will be faster. And this kind of vaccine is already in mass production.

Although there are no shortcuts to establishing safety and efficacy, suggestions have been made on how to test these vaccines more quickly without sacrificing scientific rigor. For example, in February, WHO published a draft protocol For Phase 2 and 3 trials where a large number of candidates are tested simultaneously in multinational trials according to standardized criteria.

Another suggestion is to give healthy volunteers a candidate vaccine and then run a controlled human challenge trial to transmit Sars-CoV-2. These are ethically questionable, especially before scientists understand why young and healthy people end up on ventilators. A similar approach, conducted by Hvivo, a London-based clinical research group, calls for volunteers to be infected with milder coronaviruses, but how the findings apply to Sars-CoV-2. It is not clear.

For Covid-19, there are still many unknowns, such as how long the vaccine will provide protection. A strong sign of this is whether people who have recovered from the disease can catch it again. There have been reports of reinfections, but the phenomena are not well understood. “If we weren’t prevented our bodies from getting it again, it would be one pretty terrible signal,” says Wentworth.

Even after a vaccine has been licensed, there are political obstacles to getting the vaccine where it is needed. Each country or public health jurisdiction must develop its own vaccine. There may also be a prioritization issue-if supplies are limited, who should get it first-authorities are currently discussing.

A vaccine approved one year from now may arrive after the end of the current pandemic, but it is not wasted. Initially, Covid-19 may recur seasonally. Different outbreaks of coronavirus. It does not comfort the victims of this pandemic or their relatives, but it does mean that humanity will be better protected in the future. As Wentworth says: “That learning, we don’t learn.”