Coronavirus : when will we have the vaccine ?

Hello everyone,

A great part of mankind had to face an unseen situation these past few months : overcoming the coronavirus crisis that will certainly be a historical event. We had to adapt ourselves to new habits such as wearing a face mask everyday or get used to social distancing. We all want this to stop, but unfortunately we have to wait for the creation of a new vaccine that could save many lives. So since the start of this global pandemic, a race to find this award started between several countries around the world, laboratories had to shorten the vaccination process. But even after seven months of active circulation, we still don’t know when we will have THE vaccine that will let us have normal lives anew.

But why does it take so much time to elaborate a vaccine ? What is the vaccine creation process ? When will we have it ?

We all want to have answers to those questions so I investigated to give you them.

This leads me to explain the origin of this extraordinary brainchild : vaccines. Its story starts in 1796, when the scientist Edward Jenner injected material from the cowpox to a child in order to help him fight against the smallpox virus and it works ! The child was immunized from the smallpox. The very first vaccine was created ! So in 1798 the first smallpox vaccine as we know it today was created. Thanks to Edward Jenner in 1979, the smallpox was eradicated from earth, which proves us that collective immunity exists. Collective immunity is “when a certain percentage of people are immunized from a disease, the part of the population who is not will be protected” . After this discovery, many scientists invented or improved vaccines such as Louis Pasteur who created vaccines against cholera or Alexander Glenny who perfected a method to inactivate tetanus toxin.

But how by injecting material in our body, are we immunized against diseases ?

When a microbe is entering the body, an immune response is triggered to eliminate this foreign body. This immune response is in great part due to the action of two specific cells : b-cells and t-cells. These cells have the mission to fight and remember every microbes, in order to elaborate a specific response. When those cells have remembered the immune response corresponding to the kind of microbe, the next time the body will be infected with the same foreign body, the immune response will be realized immediately after the contagion, so microbes won’t have enough time to spread and the body will be treated more quickly.

Vaccination has been created in order to train the immune system to have a quick and efficient response to fight microbes. The goal of the vaccines is to prepare the body to respond to an invasion without exposing it to the disease because the body needs time to build its immune response.

To train our immune system, scientists created four kind of vaccines :

• live attenuated vaccines : in these vaccines microbes are alive but they are too weak to invade the body and let the patient become ill. They create a long lasting effect on the body but unfortunately they are very difficult to make because scientists have to make sure that there are no risks for the body.

• inactive vaccine : in this way of making a vaccine, microbes are killed in order to let the immune system learn to recognize the invaser. But it doesn’t create a long lasting immunity.

• subunit vaccine : this type of vaccine is made with a part of a microbe called antigen. The goal of this one is to create a specific immune response.

• DNA vaccine : this technology is new but the vaccine is created by isolating the gene that makes the antigen the body needs to fight the disease, this is creating a long-lasting response. When the genetic material is injected, it instructs cells of the body to create a specific response, the body is creating the antigen. Because this is a brand new technology scientists don’t know a lot of things about it but if it is efficient it will be an amazing discovery for science.

As you can imagine, creating a vaccine is a long process that takes a lot of time. To let you understand, I did some research on the different steps necessary to create a vaccine. In order to make a vaccine there are three main steps that can last from 15 years to 20 years. First, the research where doctors are trying to find the best way to create the vaccine, the clinical testing which is the longest phase where the vaccine is tested on more and more patient (in this part is also experimenting the safety, the efficiency, the dosage and sides effects on an important amount of people), after this step if the vaccine has conclusive result, a national regulatory authority can or can not give the authorization to manufacture the vaccine. Finally, manufacturing is the very last step of our process. The purpose of this phase is to make the vaccine in great quantities to let as many people as possible have the opportunity to be vaccinated.

This process is very efficient but during a global pandemic, these steps have to be shortened. So what scientists can do to have a vaccine more quickly ?

When scientists have to create an efficient vaccine in a few months instead of 20 years, they have two solutions : whether they can take another vaccine that works for another disease and could work for the new microbe but it does not always work. Or they can create a new vaccine which takes more time but promises to be efficient. When doctors decide to create a new vaccine they ought to shorten the manufacturing period. So every steps of the vaccine creations are made in parallel at the same time in several laboratories throughout the world. In the future, researchers will probably make vaccine production shorter by working on precedent vaccines and adapt them to the new pathogenic agent, but for now nations have to cooperate.

During a pandemic the goal of a vaccine is to create a collective immune response. So, the more vaccinated we are, the more we will fight the pandemic because it will create a collective immune response. To relate this to the coronavirus, some laboratories are now at the phase 3 of the testing on population, so we can hope that by the end of the year we could have a vaccine against the coronavirus. It could save many lives and let us have “normal” days but for now to protect ourselves and others we have to respect social distancing and to wear face masks.

Anew, this article was a bit different from the one I did before but even this I hope you enjoyed reading it !

Have a nice week !

The French Art De Vivre

PS : for once I didn't take the picture myself but because I don't want to appropriate pictures which are not mine, I chose to take it from the website pixabay who is offering images free from authors right.

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