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“This is going to go away without a vaccine,” Donald Trump said last week. “He’s going to leave, and we won’t see him again, hopefully, after a period of time.”
Trump’s personal insistence that a vaccine will not be necessary to defeat the coronavirus has prompted US officials to warn that Americans’ access to an eventual vaccine could be delayed, despite cutting-edge laboratory work being carried out. out on American soil.
And the Trump administration’s focus on finding a vaccine has seen it exclude the US government. USA From an accelerated global effort against Covid-19, raising concern that the effort could fail without official US support and leadership. USA
Scientists around the world believe that humanity will achieve multiple effective Covid-19 vaccines in record time. In the wake of multinational struggles against Ebola, Zika, HIV, and other killers, the global infrastructure to undertake complicated immunization and vaccination projects has never been stronger, and the American experience plays an essential role.
But even as U.S.-based research labs move candidate vaccines into clinical trials and pharmaceutical companies reorganize U.S. factories to prepare for large-scale production, the U.S. government has turned its back to the global coalition fighting the disease.
Unlike Britain, China, Canada, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Japan, numerous African countries, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Gates Foundation, and the European Commission, the United States did not send representation last week to a Virtual world summit that raised more than $ 8 billion for the coronavirus vaccine.
Instead, Trump, who for years has spread Dangerous Lies About Vaccination: You’ve tapped into your son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and others to lead what appears to be a one-sided push for a vaccine the administration has dubbed “Operation Deformation Speed.”
Details of Operation Warp Speed have not been announced, but the White House has set itself the goal of having 100m of vaccine doses by fall, a goal that a Republican senator called “incredibly ambitious” and that scientists reject .
Stephen Morrison, who heads the global health program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that the White House has not signaled any plans to join an upcoming virtual world summit on vaccines scheduled for June 4.
“What the United States has chosen at these recent meetings (not to attend and not to participate) has chosen to start talking about a kind of going-alone approach,” he said. “He appears to be taking an” America First “approach.
“The risk is that this type of deviation by the US. USA Fracture international efforts and create tensions, uncertainties and insecurities. That is the risk.
“And if we fracture the ecosystem, does that slow us down? Does it make resolutions that are effective and universal much more difficult to achieve?
“Everyone should be protected”
Inside tightly secured labs on opposite ends of the state of Pennsylvania, scientists are following two very different and promising avenues that could lead to a coronavirus vaccine.
At the University of Pittsburgh Vaccine Research Center, a team led by director Paul Duprex is genetically grafting peak coronavirus proteins into the measles virus to create a product that could be rapidly manufactured in the hundreds of millions of doses from India to Indianapolis.
“This is precisely why we as virologists exist,” Duprex said. “I’ve been teaching students about emerging and reemerging infectious diseases for years: Ebola, West Nile, bird flu, measles, mumps, etc. However, when you’re in the midst of a new virus that spreads rapidly from person to person, things are different. “
Meanwhile, at the Wistar Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, a team led by David Weiner has used DNA technology to design a candidate vaccine whose long shelf life and temperature stability could accelerate its worldwide distribution.
The Pittsburgh team is now preparing to evaluate its first human subjects. The Philadelphia team has already given its candidate vaccine to about 40 people after encouraging results in mice, rabbits, guinea pigs and non-human primates. Hopes for a breakthrough are high.
“This collective set of work, in this set of trials, gives us optimism that we are likely to see immune responses” in humans from the candidate vaccine, Weiner told the Guardian. His laboratory expects to publish its first clinical trial results in June.
While the US government USA It has been left out of the global fight, American labs, pharmaceutical companies, and US-based foundations. USA They are fully engaged in a greater effort, linked with foreign partners in a common pursuit.
“This is a truly international problem, an international puzzle that we have to solve,” Duprex said.
The coronavirus pandemic presents a quintessential global challenge, experts say. Even a good vaccine might not confer long-term immunity, which means that the virus will not be defeated anywhere until it is defeated everywhere.
“None of us can accept a world in which some people are protected while others are not. Everyone should be protected, ”said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, in a conference call last week. “None of us is safe until we are all safe.”
At best, a vaccine to protect against the coronavirus could start broad production in the next 12-18 months, scientists say. The OMS It lists eight candidate vaccines that are already in clinical trials, meaning that doses are being administered to humans, and 100 more candidates are now in the preclinical stage.
“This is not like AIDS or tuberculosis,” said Paul Reider, a renowned research chemist in the pharmaceutical industry who teaches at Princeton University. “This is an area where numerous vaccines will be successful, and they will be safe and effective.”
Duprex is working with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and with Themis, a biomedical company based in Austria. Weiner and his team are collaborating with Inovio, a US-based biotech company. USA Which subcontracts manufacturing to Richter-Helm BioLogics, based in Germany.
Each Pennsylvania project is supported by millions of dollars in grants from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) Foundation, based in Oslo, Norway, and supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the London-based Wellcome Trust. .
“Making a vaccine takes time and is not trivial,” said Reider. “We are going to need four or five vaccines that are effective, produced in all the vaccine factories in the world, to get them out there.”
But Trump has attacked key international actors in the effort, including the who and China, which has four candidate vaccines in clinical trials, compared to the three advanced by companies linked to the United States.
Morrison said Trump appeared to be playing before a national political audience by sending a message “that we are taking action on our own, that we are less dependent on others, that we will deliver faster and more furious than our competition.”
“What we are seeing is applying that ideological approach to this particular crisis, and putting health security in that spotlight,” Morrison said. “We have not seen that until now in these terms.”
“We are not sure what the hesitation will be like”
There are ominous indications that the United States has been exceptionally bad at flattening the Covid-19 death curve. The country may also be inadequate to implement a new vaccine program, analysts say, due to a lack of federal standards for vaccination, a broken health system, rampant inequality, and a thriving community of vaccination skeptics.
Any vaccine deployed in the United States is likely to have to be phased in since 330m doses cannot be produced at one time. That ensures advance planning on how to protect vulnerable people, said Paul Delamater, a geography professor at the Carolina Population Center, whose work focuses on gaps in the health system.
“The geography of the risk of adverse outcomes for coronavirus can be quite variable,” he said. “One question we’re working on: who should get vaccinated first, under what kind of scenarios?”
Another question the country may face is how to achieve herd immunity when an unknown number of Americans are expected to reject the vaccine.
“We are not sure what hesitation is going to be like,” Delamater said, noting that the flu vaccine, which is widely available and heavily promoted every year, only has an absorption rate of about 50%.
“I think Covid will be different from the flu because there has been a scare and people will be tired of social distancing,” he said. “So I think the absorption will be greater than the flu, but … I am concerned that the hesitation may be greater due to the speed at which the vaccine was developed and deployed.”
“Salk could never have dreamed of these things”
“[Dr Jonas] Salk could never have dreamed of these things, because it really is completely different, “Duprex said, referring to the celebrated American scientist who developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Duprex was contrasting the new style of vaccination, which uses genetic engineering to show the immune system something safe that it perceives as dangerous, and the traditional style, in which attenuated viruses are used to provoke an immune response.
Duprex’s laboratory was one of the first research laboratories in the country to receive samples of the coronavirus. Harvested from a Seattle patient, they arrived on dry ice on Valentine’s Day.
Numerous vaccine technologies will be needed to deliver a comprehensive solution on time, said Weiner of the Philadelphia laboratory.
Despite all his past skepticism about vaccines, Trump has promoted a good one soon. “We are very confident that we are going to have a vaccine by the end of the year,” he told Fox News last weekend. Duprex called that time frame “probably difficult.”
“Twelve to 18 months is not impossible, but it is a great question, and it depends on everything going perfectly. And you know life, I know science: nothing works perfectly in life. Nothing goes perfectly in science.”
“The idea is definitely aspirational,” Weiner of the 12-18 month window said, “and we should, as scientists, be as aspiring as possible in this and think about breaking down the barriers while keeping the focus on security.”
Duprex reflected on the history of the American leadership in vaccine research, from Salk to Albert Sabin, who developed the oral polio vaccine.
“We have been as important as a country” in vaccine development, he said.
“It’s weird to have all that rich history collaborative in biomedical science, and then think, at one point, for reasons that are hard to understand: that you want to do it alone, with a global problem.”
“When collaboration is more necessary than ever.”
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