The fastest mass inoculation in the history of humanity: COVID-19
A vaccine approved and administered at scale in just a year.
Like countless times throughout history, we have witnessed in the last year, an international vaccine race.
The race to inoculate the human population after we were ridden with a plague unlike anything in modern history.
In the 1960’s, it took two decades, a handful of lawsuits, and an aborted fetus used without its mothers consent, before we landed at the first rubella vaccine.
The first generation of vaccines, smallpox, measles, polio, have similar horrific but remarkable tales.
When we take a closer look at some modern vaccines, we find some much more comparable voyages to our novel COVID-19.
It took almost five years from the first Ebola case for the first vaccine to be approved in Europe for example.
It took a while for substantial funding to be offered to a vaccine development programme as the severity of the epidemic became exponentially more obvious.
Within four months of the first registered cases of COVID-19, the US Department of Health and Human Services accounded their mission ‘Operation Warp Speed’ on COVID immunization.
Almost every nation with the infrastructure was working on a viable vaccine.
The UK was the first nation to grant a vaccine ‘emergency use approval’, just a year after the world saw its first cases of COVID-19.
There were many steps in expediting vaccine development this time round.
The HSS guaranteed vaccine development to any viable vaccine candidate. This gave new and rare security to developers.
The HSS also purchased vaccine doses in their hundreds and thousands while the vaccines were still in their very early stages of clinical trials.
Again this gave developers new financial guarantees.
Traditional attenuated virus vaccines were scrapped by most developers, taking a live virus and damaging it in such a way it cannot cause disease but still allows you to develop immunity.
These vaccines often have various complications that take longer to wien out in clinical trials. The time pressure in the current pandemic makes this route less than ideal.
Instead, as we have all heard and debated, mRNA vaccines were popular this time. (Check out my earlier article ‘Why mRNA vaccines all of a sudden?’)
The almost infinite resources available for this crisis led to the accelerated development of these mRNA that have been in progress for some ten years.
These vaccines can be mass produced at an enormous scale much easier than any other current vaccine model.
The fastest vaccine to be developed to date was for mumps in around 4 years back in the 1960’s.
This time round, that speed has accelerated by four times.
One major challenge in getting a vaccine approved for some modern diseases like ebola for example, is that they occur as sporadic epidemics.
The disease pops up in different locations at different times.
This makes consistent, rigorous testing very hard to achieve. These tests are essential in showing strong evidence for the vaccine's efficacy.
In the case of COVID-19, the pandemic has been raging consistently and across every continent making it remarkably easy to test experimental vaccines and collect volumes of data.
The unfathomable crisis and emergency of the current situation also meant that there was no shortage of volunteers willing to take part in these trials.
Another important detail about SARS-CoV-2 (the pathogen responsible for COVID-19), is that it happens to be a member of an extremely well studied family of viruses, the coronaviruses.
A lot of research had already been done in understanding the fundamental pathology and molecular structure of SARS-CoV for example.
This pandemic is not only a humanitarian crisis endangering perhaps a handful of communities. Loss of life has been exponential in all continents of the globe.
Immunization seemed to be the only option.
The sheer number of cases and deaths deems the situation a global political and economic emergency.
Put simply, global concern results in global resources.. global funding.
Similar pressures would have to repeat themselves to cause a similar remarkable outcome in the future.
We can hope that the potential consequences will be acknowledged much earlier if ever a similar crisis presents itself.
References
https://www.biospace.com/article/a-timeline-of-covid-19-vaccine-development/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03626-1
https://www.biopharma-reporter.com/Article/2019/11/15/A-timeline-of-Ebola-vaccine-development
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/mumps
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25824845/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33328140/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32785815/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32761294/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32793245/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32784685/
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/ebola-vaccines
https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/ebola-vaccines