No matter the degree of skiing or the angle you look at, coronavirus vaccines are a triumph. Today they save lives; they will help end this pandemic; and will pay scientific dividends for generations.
The big picture: The pandemic is not over. We still have big threats and big problems to solve. But for all the things that have gone wrong over the last year, the vaccines themselves have broken even the most ambitious expectations.
Vaccines represent an “impressive scientific achievement for the world … unprecedented in the history of vaccinology,” said Dan Barouch, a Harvard virology and vaccine expert who worked on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Details: The development of a vaccine takes an average of ten years, if it works. Despite years of well-funded research, there are still no vaccines against HIV or malaria, for example.
- We now have several COVID-19 vaccines, all developed in less than a year.
- The 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 inactivated or weakened viruses. It is a milestone that scientists have been working on for 30 years.
- Moderna’s vaccine is the company’s first licensed product of any kind.
The most important, all leading vaccines work very well.
- The four vaccines or vaccine candidates in the United States – 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 significantly exceed the FDA threshold to be considered effective.
The catch: South Africa on Sunday halted distribution of the AstraZeneca vaccine because it appeared to be not working against the dangerous variant that was discovered there, which is spreading around the world.
- Other vaccine manufacturers have also said their products are not as effective against the South African variant.
But that is a reason so that the rest of the world is included in existing vaccines, without distrusting them.
- Viruses can they mutate when they spread widely. The best defense against widespread variants is to vaccinate as many people as possible and increase social distancing to contain the virus.
- Drug manufacturers may need to develop booster injections or new prescriptions to treat variants, but waiting for a vaccine to address all variants will only leave the door open for more variants.
Our biggest problems they are not with the vaccines, but with the processes that surround them.
- Supplies need to be increased; distribution needs to be much more efficient; we need to make sure people get their second shots, if any; and people should be willing to get vaccinated once they are eligible.
- This is a long and difficult to-do list, and making mistakes in these things could drag the pandemic for years. But if we manage to get the process right, the vaccines themselves are powerful enough to get the job done.
“Once the story of this is written, they will be said to be some of the greatest achievements of science, “Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina with a background in coronavirus prevention, told Ezra Klein in the New York Times.
- “It’s the kind of thing you’d have a national celebration, fireworks and church bells and all that,” he said.
This was not a miracle, and it did not happen overnight. “What we’ve seen over the last year is the result and culmination of decades of scientific advances,” Barouch said.
- Researchers have been building towards mRNA-based vaccines for about 30 years, driven by broader advances in the genetic sciences.
- These same advances have also greatly accelerated genetic sequencing, which is why researchers were able to trace the structure of COVID-19 in a few weeks after discovering the virus and starting work on potential vaccines.
What follows: The vaccine race is one of the few areas in this whole pandemic where the United States and the world can learn from our successes rather than our failures.
- Scientists hope that the advancement 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.
- Investing money in vaccine developers and establishing early and step-by-step communication with regulatory agencies also helped speed up this process and may help again in future pandemics.
The summary: “Good funding, great science and great collaboration with regulatory agencies – so they were able to do something that I didn’t think could be done in a year,” said Mark Slifka, professor of immunology at Oregon Health & Science University.