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– At best, we can vaccinate here in Norway in the fall of 2021. More realistically, it will happen a year or two after that., believe the professor and superior, who is on the board of the National Institute of Public Health and staff for infection control, the environment and health.
– In the worst case, it will be even more years. But sooner or later we have a vaccine, he tells NTB.
optimism
Chief Physician Preben Aavitsland at the Institute of Public Health. Photo: Tor Erik Schrøder / NTB scanpix Photo: NTB scanpix
When someone says they hope to have a vaccine ready as soon as September or by the end of the year, Aavitsland says that optimism is not uncommon in the early stages.
– The problem is that problems often arise in later stages. And then there is the question of what it means for a vaccine to be “ready.” It can mean everything from being ready for human testing to being ready for everyone, Explain.
And there are no few steps that a vaccine must go through. First create what is called a candidate vaccine. This is tested on animals and then on humans, first to see if it is harmful and then to verify that it really works. If you overcome all these obstacles and get the vaccine approved, new challenges await you.
– Then you must create a production process and produce hundreds of millions of doses of the vaccine. This may require the construction of new factories, explains Aavitsland.
Different protection
He says there is good hope that one of the nearly 100 research groups trying to make a vaccine will succeed. The professor points out that the result may be a vaccine that does not protect against infection, but that contracts a milder disease and does not even transmit it.
– It will also be useful. It’s also possible that one can build a vaccine that actually provides better immunity than the actual infection, says Aavitsland.
He explains that the immunity that arises after infection is normally the best, because then the body has fought a real attack.
– Vaccines should mimic this as closely as possible, but in most cases they will not give such good immunity, says the superior.
Vaccines can use parts of viruses, dead viruses, or weakened viruses. For the coronavirus, there are especially some tips that protrude from the surface that are interesting. Then it may be possible to use other harmless viruses that have been altered to have the same chicken coops, or the relic that causes body cells to produce roosters, to which the immune system can react.
Want to learn more
So far, there have been several reports on whether people become immune after getting sick. Aavitsland says the problem is that this is not easy to measure. It is possible to find and measure antibodies in the blood of almost everyone who has had an infection, but this does not tell the whole story.
– The facet is if you can get sick a second time. There are few examples, and then there may have been only dead virus residues that were measured the second time, says Aavitsland.
The virus that causes covid-19 is still fairly new, but he believes that in the coming weeks and months we will learn much more about how the immune system works in the virus.
Watch video: ABC explains: developing a vaccine can be as fast as possible
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