COVID-19 vaccine

It’s still early days for 2 coronavirus vaccine candidates, but trial results published yesterday in The Lancet earned promising (though qualified) results.

The first vaccine, developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca and sporting the catchy name of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, safely generated strong immune responses in a trial involving 1,000+ patients, according to a Lancet article reported on by The Washington Post.

Larger phase 3 trials of the vaccine are already underway in the UK, Brazil, and South Africa with results expected sometime this fall, STAT reports.

The WHO will issue ethical guidelines to inform human challenge trials, South China Morning Post reports, amid aggressive efforts to find a COVID-19 vaccine.

Deliberately infecting healthy human volunteers with a virus to test vaccine candidates can speed the vaccine timeline—but it’s a dangerous tack for a disease with no cure.

With COVID-19, however, proponents argue that the risk of serious illness or death is small in likely recruits—young adults.

Some people question why the current coronavirus has brought the world to standstill while a previous deadly coronavirus, SARS, did not.

Others have questioned why a vaccine is so urgently needed now to stop the spread of the current coronavirus when a vaccine was never developed for SARS.

I study viruses and am so fascinated by their complexity that I have written a book about them. The tale of SARS and its new cousin that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, shows just how unpredictable viruses can be, particularly when they jump from animals to humans. Understanding emerging, infectious diseases needs to be a priority. SARS, which killed about one in 10 infected people, turned out to be highly lethal but ultimately, and somewhat mysteriously, disappeared.

The availability of a vaccine for the novel coronavirus will likely play a key role in determining when Americans can return to life as usual. Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on April 30 announced that a vaccine could even be available by January 2021.

Whether a vaccine can end this pandemic successfully, however, depends on more than its effectiveness at providing immunity against the virus, or how quickly it can be produced in mass quantities. Americans also must choose to receive the vaccine.

For many, a COVID-19 vaccine can’t come soon enough, but vaccine opponents are already undermining "confidence in what could be humanity’s best chance to defeat the virus," the AP reports.

They’re spreading misinformation:

• Vaccine trials will be rushed
• Anthony Fauci is in cahoots with vaccine makers seeking to profit off the tragedy
• Bill Gates wants to use a vaccine to inject people with microchips or curb the population.
  

Full-scale efforts are underway to develop a vaccine free us from COVID-19’s deadly grip. But even if they succeed (and that’s no guarantee), the question regrettably must be asked: Will people take it?

Given the severity of the current crisis, taking countless lives and sending our socioeconomic systems to the brink of collapse, it seems unimaginable that anyone would reject a Coronavirus vaccine. Yet, over the last 2 decades, vaccine hesitancy has risen so substantially that the WHO now considers it a major threat to global health.

About a month ago, Medical News Today started a series aiming to bring together the more encouraging research that emerges around COVID-19. We continue with this Special Feature that focuses on an incoming vaccine and other potential treatments for this new coronavirus and the disease it causes.

With this series, we aim to remind our readers that while COVID-19 causes great sorrow and loss around the world, the resulting global emergency has also meant that scientists are working at an unprecedented pace. They are making progress that is easy to overlook among the worrying numbers of new cases and deaths.

A mix of legacy drug makers and small startups have stepped forward with plans to develop vaccines or treatments that target the infection caused by the novel coronavirus.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was first detected in December in Wuhan, China, has sickened more than 1,150,000 people worldwide and killed at least 64,500. There are no approved vaccines or therapies for the disease although the use of hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate to treat COVID-19 patients is authorised.