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Ten years of work were summed up in about 10 months in the case of the Oxford University coronavirus vaccine in collaboration with the company AstraZeneca, whose effectiveness reaches up to 90%, as announced this Monday (11/23).
However, according to experts, and to avoid many questioning its safety, its development and tests do not hide anything bad about it.
The speed of its development is due to a combination of luck and scientific minds, and the vaccine has its roots in the deadly outbreak of Ebola, but also in a chimpanzee’s runny nose.
The work started years ago
The biggest mistake is that the research on the vaccine began when the coronavirus pandemic began.
The world’s largest Ebola outbreak, which occurred in 2014-2016, was a disaster. The reaction was very slow and 11,000 people died.
“People should have done better,” Professor Sarah Gilbert, architect of the Oxford vaccine, told the BBC.
From the accusations that followed, a plan emerged on how to deal with the next great epidemic. At the bottom of the list of known threats was “Disease X,” the name of a new, unknown infection that would affect the world.
Named after the scientist who performed the first vaccination in 1796 and is now home to some of the world’s leading experts, the Jenner Institute at Oxford University has devised a strategy to defeat an unknown enemy.
“We were planning how we could go really fast to vaccinate someone as soon as possible,” said Professor Gilbert. “We didn’t complete the project, but we did quite well.”
The crucial part of the technology
Central to its design was a revolutionary vaccine style known as “plug and play.” It has two special features for dealing with the unknown: it is fast and flexible.
Conventional vaccines, including the entire childhood immunization program, use a lethal or attenuated form of the original infection or inject fragments into the body. But these are developing slowly.
Instead, the Oxford researchers created ChAdOx1, or Chimpanzee Adenovirus Oxford One.
The scientists took a common cold virus that infected chimpanzees and engineered it to become the building block of a vaccine against just about anything.
Before Covid-19, 330 people had been vaccinated with ChAdOx1-based vaccines for diseases ranging from influenza, Zika virus, and prostate cancer to tropical tsikungunya disease.
The chimpanzee virus is genetically modified and cannot infect humans. Then it can be modified again to contain the genetic blueprints for whatever it is you want to train the immune system to attack. This target is known as an antigen.
ChAdOx1 is essentially a tiny, sophisticated postman. All scientists have to do is change the package.
New Year
While much of the world passed last New Year’s Eve without the slightest concern, Gilbert noted reports of “viral pneumonia” in Yuhan, China. Within two weeks, scientists identified the responsible virus and began to suspect that it could have spread to humans.
“We were planning for Disease X, we were waiting for Disease X and I thought it might be,” Gilbert said.
At this point, the team didn’t know how important their job would be. It started as a test of how fast they could run the process and as a demonstration of the ChAdOx1 technology.
“I thought it could be just a program, we would make the vaccine and the virus would disappear. But it didn’t happen,” he said.
A lucky pandemic
As paradoxical as it may sound, it was fortunate that the pandemic was caused by a coronavirus.
This family of viruses had tried to pass from animals to humans twice in the last 20 years: Sars in 2002 and Mers in 2012. This meant that scientists knew the biology of the virus, how it behaved and the protein in the beak.
“We got off to a great start,” said Professor Andrew Pollard of the Oxford team.
The spike protein is the key that the virus uses to open the door to the cells of our body. If a vaccine could train the immune system to attack the beak, then the team knew it was likely to be successful.
And they had already developed a ChAdOx1 vaccine for Mers, which could train the immune system to detect the spike. The Oxford team did not start from scratch.
“If this were a completely unknown virus, then we would be in a very different position,” added Professor Pollard.
It was also fortunate that coronaviruses cause infections in the short term. It means that the body is capable of defeating the virus and a vaccine simply has to take advantage of this natural process.
If it was a long-term or chronic infection that the body could not defeat, such as HIV, it is unlikely that a vaccine would work.
On January 11, Chinese scientists published and announced to the world the complete genetic code of the coronavirus. The team had everything they needed to make a Covid-19 vaccine.
The necessary controls
Quality control is never the most enjoyable part of a program, but researchers cannot begin giving people an experimental vaccine until they are sure it has been effective enough.
At each stage of the manufacturing process, they had to ensure that the vaccine was not contaminated with viruses or bacteria. In the past, this was a long process.
“If we hadn’t thought about how to shorten the time, we could have gotten a vaccine in March,” Gilbert said.
Instead, when tests on animals showed the vaccine to be safe, researchers were able to begin testing the vaccine in humans on April 23.
Dr. Mark Tosner, who was involved in the trials, said the idea that it would take 10 years to test a vaccine was misleading. “Most of the time, it’s a long time with nothing,” he said.
He describes it as a process of writing grant applications, rejecting them, returning them, getting approved for testing, negotiating with manufacturers, and trying to get enough people involved. Years can pass from one phase to the next.
“The process is great, not because it has to be, not because it is safe, but because of the real world,” said Dr. Tosner.
Safety was not sacrificed. Instead, the scientific impetus to conduct the trials, the people who want to participate, and, of course, the money overlook many of the usual delays.
This does not mean that there will be no problems in the future; medical research cannot guarantee this. In general, the side effects of vaccines appear at the time of administration or a few months later. Rarer problems may occur when millions of people are vaccinated, but this is true for all vaccines that have been developed to date.
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