Everyone wants a Coronavirus vaccine. It would be a passport back to normality and is thus the Holy Grail being sought throughout the World. Sadly, as in mythology, it is very elusive. Scientists both here and elsewhere are striving with every sinew to produce the magic inoculation or injection that will be the catalyst to bringing society back to pre-COVID-19 life.
The hopes of early success were never great. I recall Professor Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, stating quite honestly that the chances of getting such a vaccine within a year were very small indeed. Other specialists have suggested that, if we get one, it could take up to 18 months. But is that right now?
In earlier posts I speculated, based on Government announcements, that we might have some form of working vaccine by the autumn. Indeed, the Government has recently announced that AstraZeneca and Oxford University should have the vaccine by September and that a deal had been struck for the partnership to produce 30 million shots of the magic formula. Alok Sharma on Sunday 17 May’s press briefing slightly qualified the deal, by suggesting that it would only go ahead if trials worked. Here’s to rials being successful.
The way vaccines work is as follows. Inoculated or injected they enter into the bloodstream and from there they train each person’s immune system to prevent them developing, in this case COVID-19. They are specific and normally targeted on to one disease only. The person who is vaccinated then becomes immune to the disease. Then, if enough people become immune, the coronavirus would not be able to spread so effectively and social distancing measures would no longer be necessary.
In earlier posts I also mentioned the start of human trials of this vaccine but Oxford University has also announced that they will not really know whether they have it right before the middle of June. Apparently there have been some early signs of success but there is a long way to go.
In fact, a team at the University of Oxford had been preparing for an event like the Covid-19 pandemic well before the current global outbreak. To that end they had already created a genetically engineered chimpanzee virus that would form the basis for the new vaccine. They are now combining that with parts of the new Coronavirus germ. The result is, hopefully, a safe virus that trains the immune system to fight Covid-19.
Of course, the big question is whether this experimental vaccine will actually work. Professor Sarah Gilbert (who I have mentioned in previous posts), is the lead researcher developing the vaccine. She believes there is an 80 per cent certainty that it will. Quoting from her directly; "This is my view, because I've worked with this technology a lot, and I've worked on the Mers-vaccine trials (another type of coronavirus), and I've seen what that can do…. and, I think, it has a very strong chance of working."
The Oxford based team are confident and have been able to convince the Government of that too. Thus, the order of 30 million vaccine shots by September. It would indeed mean we had found the Holy Grail if human trials are successful in arresting COVID-19.
There is an ironic problem though. The success of lockdown might slow results of tests down. If the number of Coronavirus cases falls the it may take longer for researchers to know if a vaccine has been effective. Apparently, they may have to go into hospitals with Coronavirus patients to get enough people for their trial. That’s really weird is it not?
Outside the UK some 80 scientific groups and major pharmaceutical companies are also in a race to develop a vaccine and some, like AstraZeneca and Oxford University, have already started human trials. Previously I have mentioned promising trials taking place in San Diego, California. All this research is taking place at unprecedented speed - years of experimental work are being condensed into months. Obviously more haste less accuracy and possibly more mistakes. But I suspect never in scientific history has so much effort and resources been put into a single objective.
We seem to have been let down quite a bit too. For instance, the Government apparently paid £16 million to import 2 million antibody tests from China and then decided that the tests simply were not reliable. Again, from China some 250 ventilators were purchased in early April but they didn’t work either. Then did we not fly the RAF out to Turkey to bring back 400,000 PPE gowns only to discover on landing back in the UK they did not comply with our medical standards. Although I understand that the Government was in a tight spot all that looks pretty desperate. Clearly those three examples reek of incompetence. I would like to know just how they happened but I suspect we will have to wait a while for answers to that.
The reality is that the Government and the rest of us are desperate to find a way out of this crisis. From the start obtaining a vaccine has been the very best option. I really hope that AstraZeneca and Oxford University have the answer. It would be fabulous if we were all inoculated and effectively immune to Coronavirus by the end of the year. When scientists as brilliant as Professor Sarah Gilbert state categorically that she thinks we have it – the Holy Grail – then my heart soars. A vaccine for Coronavirus would definitely put her name up in lights. In truth she and her team could be considered as saviours in much the same way as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin saved millions of lives. Finding a vaccine for Coronavirus right now is gold dust.
Yet there remains one tiny niggle in my mind. AIDS is an illness caused by a virus too and, although we now have drugs to control it, I believe that no vaccine which stops or cures the illness has been found. Please Lord let there be a vaccine for Coronavirus.