How to Vaccinate an Entire Country
How to Vaccinate an Entire Country

Companies racing to develop an effective vaccine, will it make or break our economy?

16.5 million who once had COVID.

300,000 dead.

And that’s just in the United States.

Pfizer, one of the leading COVID vaccine companies, was recently authorized to release their vaccines for distribution. They are facing some withdrawals with distribution, but are striving to get it out to the public.

The Problem: finding the perfect balance between safety and speed

Operation Warp Speed

Because of the pandemic's urgency, the White House has launched Operation Warp Speed, which provides funding to speed up the distribution process.

Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna are working on a vaccine that they hope to be distributed to the world soon enough, but are still undergoing clinical trials.

In this case, pharmaceutical companies are focusing on developing an mRNA vaccine.

How Do Vaccines Work?

In a traditional immunization, the injection contains a weakened form of the virus into the body. This triggers the immune system to produce antibodies.

Unlike the traditional methods, the mRNA vaccine approach doesn’t require injecting a virus into a patient to create antibodies.

Antibodies are specialized proteins that bind like a lock-and-key to the body’s invaders — including viruses, bacteria, fungi, or parasites. Their task in the immune system is to mark an enemy and destroy it.

The mRNA approach to the vaccine encodes instructions into a synthetic string of mRNA on how to produce antibodies to defeat the virus. Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is molecules that transport instructions to the part of the cell that creates proteins. Once induced, the mRNA reproduces those antibodies.

A traditional vaccine would need the virus inside of the person’s body to create the antibodies. However, an mRNA vaccine would not need the virus inside of the person’s system.

Any world regulatory body has never approved this new approached vaccine.

Nevertheless, there are some advantages:

no risk of the virus in the system

easier to manufacture

The U.S. government preordered 100 million doses from Pfizer and 100 million doses from Moderna, both in 2020.

However, both vaccines are undergoing clinical trials.

Phases

Vaccines often encounter three stages of clinical trials before they are FDA approved.

Stage 1 tests the vaccine on a small group of healthy people to ensure the drug is safe enough to move on to stage 2.

Stage 2 has 100s of volunteers. Stage 2’s goal is to monitor body systems and continuously track risks and side effects.

Stage 3 is conducted on thousands of people. Researchers are monitoring safety and how effective the vaccine is. Half the group in stage 3 are injected with a placebo, and the other half are injected with the vaccine.

A placebo is a pill, injection, or thing that appears to be a medical treatment, but isn’t. It is a “fake” treatment used in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of the “real” treatment (which is the vaccine).

The volunteers are randomly given either the placebo or the vaccine. This creates an unbiased trial as the researchers are also unaware of who is injected with what.

The process of Stage 3 is the most arduous phase, lasting from 1–3 years.

Distribution

Moderna’s CEO, Stephan Bancel, noted that the best-case scenario for vaccine trials and vaccine distribution to start would be October 2020, and the worst case would be December 2020.

Mr. Bancel, December’s almost over…

Because of the pandemic's urgency, many scientists expect the FDA to approve some vaccines for wider uses through an emergency use authorization.

An emergency use authorization is not the same as a full approval, however. It holds a lower bar and requires less paperwork to get through the approval process. This does not mean that the vaccine cannot be trusted. It still undergoes rigorous trials to make sure the vaccine is reliable.

Even though an mRNA vaccine will be easier to manufacture, the dilemma lies in the vaccine's mass distribution. Companies such as Moderna are unable to compose sufficient doses for the whole world in such a time constraint.

To guarantee that the vaccine will reach most parts of the world, pharmaceutical companies plan on manufacturing doses before the vaccine trials are completed. This is considered manufacturing at risk. It is a precarious proposition; if the vaccine trials are not successful, factories would have to destroy the expensive vaccines.

Since there will be a limited amount of doses, the vaccination process is more selective. According to experts, the vaccine will be first given to those at high risk of contracting the virus.

Nonetheless, the main priority is to administer the vaccine equitably and ensure the safety of the vaccine.

In reality, experts believe the vaccine will be FDA approved and started for distribution in the first quarter of 2021.

Notably, communities who are suspicious of the government may hinder achieving herd immunity. This heightens distrust in the vaccine and could delay immunization.

As the virus is mutating and evolving expeditiously, will scientists be able to keep up the same pace in developing vaccines?

One can only be optimistic.

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['Fatimah Hussain']
['Coronavirus', 'Government', 'Covid 19', 'Vaccines']