Conservationists have warned that at least 5 lakh sharks are likely to be sacrificed to develop sufficient doses of an effective vaccine and immunize humanity against COVID-19.
All vaccines consist of an immune agent called an adjuvant, which means “help” in Latin, that makes the vaccine more efficient by strengthening your immune response. With the help of adjuvants, vaccines can produce more antibodies and effectively arm consumers with longer-lasting immunity against disease.
One of these adjuvants is squalene, a natural oil that is present in the liver of sharks. However, it comes at the price of a mass murder: to get a ton of squalene, it is necessary to kill approximately 3,000 sharks.
Now, Shark Allies, a California-based conservation group, has warned that to create one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine for every person on the planet, around 2.5 lakhs of sharks will have to be killed for their liver oil. . However, if two doses per person are required, then the number of sharks would double to 5 lakh.
While squalene is also found in the livers of many other animals, sharks remain the main commercial source of this naturally occurring organic compound.
According to estimates made by conservationists, around 30 lakh of sharks are killed each year so that humans can use squalene in cosmetics, machine oil and other products. British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, which has announced the mass production of 100 crore doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, has already been using shark squalene to make flu vaccines.
However, conservationists fear that this sudden increase in demand for mass vaccine production will not only threaten the shark population, but will eventually endanger them as well, especially considering that these top predators do not breed in large numbers.
In fact, species like the devouring shark and the basking shark, which are rich in this oil, are already vulnerable and, if attacked further, could be under serious threat.
To protect shark species, scientists have been actively working on a synthetic version of squalene made from fermented sugar cane.
But with such a huge, urgent and growing requirement for vaccines against the novel coronavirus, which has so far infected 3.3 million rupees and killed 10 lakhs of people worldwide, the number of sharks slaughtered for their production may even exceed the expected number. and they continue to rise higher and higher.
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