No matter how hard you break or from what angle you look at it, coronavirus vaccines are a triumph. Save lives today; will help end this pandemic in the end; and will pay scientific dividends for generations.
The whole picture: The pandemic is not over. There are still big threats in front of us and big problems to solve. But for all the things that have gone wrong in the last year, the vaccines themselves have shattered even the most ambitious expectations.
Vaccines represent an “amazing scientific achievement for the world … unprecedented in the history of vaccinology,” said Dan Barouch, an expert in virology and vaccines at Harvard who worked on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Details: The development of a vaccine takes an average of 10 years – if it works at all. Despite years of well-funded research, there are still no vaccines for HIV or malaria, for example.
- We now have several COVID-19 vaccines, all developed in less than a year.
- Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the world’s first successful mRNA vaccines – which, to oversimplify it, teach our bodies to generate an immune response without relying on weakened or inactive viruses. It is a stage that scientists have been working on for 30 years.
- The Modern Vaccine is the company’s first licensed product of any kind.
The most important, all top vaccines work extremely well.
- All four vaccines or vaccine candidates in the US – from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson – appear to prevent coronavirus deaths and provide total or near-total protection against serious disease.
- Some of the vaccines are more effective than others in preventing mild or asymptomatic infections, but all are significantly above the FDA threshold to be considered effective.
Capture: South Africa on Sunday stopped distributing the AstraZeneca vaccine because it did not appear to work against the dangerous variant found there – which is spreading around the world.
- The other vaccine manufacturers also said that their products are not as effective against the South African version.
But this is a reason for the rest of the world to lean on existing vaccines, not to shy away from them.
- Viruses can move when they spread widely. The best defense against the widespread variants is to vaccinate as many people as possible and to intensify the social distance to contain the virus.
- Doctors may need to develop booster photos or new prescriptions to cope with the variants, but waiting for a vaccine to address each variant will leave the door open only for several variants.
Our biggest problems they are not with the vaccines, but rather the processes that surround them.
- The supply must increase; distribution needs to become much more efficient; we must make sure that people receive the second blow, when appropriate; and people must be willing to get vaccinated after they are eligible.
- This is a long and difficult list to make, and doing the wrong thing could take the pandemic apart for years. But if we succeed in the right process, the vaccines themselves are strong enough to do the job.
“Once history is written, will be listed as one of the greatest achievements of science, “Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, told Ezra Klein of The New York Times with a history of coronavirus prevention.
- “It’s the kind of thing you would have on a national holiday, fireworks and church bells and all that,” she said.
It wasn’t a miracle, and it didn’t happen overnight. “What we’ve seen in the last year is the result and culmination of decades of scientific progress,” Barouch said.
- Researchers have been turning to mRNA vaccines for about 30 years, fueled by broader advances in genetic science.
- The same advances have greatly accelerated genetic sequencing – which is why researchers have been able to identify the structure of COVID-19 within weeks of the virus’s discovery and then start working on potential vaccines.
What’s next: The vaccine race is one of the few areas of this pandemic in which the US and the world will be able to learn from our successes, rather than our failures.
- Scientists hope that the discovery of successful mRNA vaccines will pave the way for a new generation of products that are more effective and easier to develop than previous vaccines.
- Reaching money to vaccine developers and establishing early, step-by-step communication with regulatory agencies have also helped speed up this process and can help again in future pandemics.
Bottom line: “Good funding, great science and great collaboration with regulators – that’s how they managed to do something we didn’t think could be done in a year,” said Mark Slifka, a professor of immunology at Oregon Health & Science University.