Community Chat

[Oznell]

Weeks ago, I posted on the efforts in both the United States and in Israel to develop the vaccine against Covid-19.

Israeli scientists have elaborated to the Jerusalem Post their opinions as to how close they are to having it.  If they are right, it's encouraging.  The track record of this group seems good.  As always, you have to figure in then the time needed for mandatory trials and regulatory period.  But getting closer, as described in the article, is good news. 

The vaccine will be available in oral form, they say.

Their details and numbers involved can be read by googling Jerusalem Post vaccine Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman (the name of the reporter.)

Grateful for the focus and work of our scientific communities! 

[deepwaterdotter]

This is the kind of uplifting news we need right now.  May these scientists soon lead us to an effective and affordable vaccine.

[Anonymous032819]

The sooner an effective vaccine becomes available, the better.

Of course, you'll have  the anti-backers who will refuse to get it, and those who won't get it because they will want to see the "long term" effects of it.

 Just how long are they willing to wait?

Five years?

Ten?

Fifty?

[spiderw]

I try to be optimistic and certainly this news is uplifting if true.  But until this happens we need to continue self isolation and hope for more testing which is vital and desperately in need.

[GingerPeach]

If anyone caught the Lawrence O'Donnell show last night, Dr. Zeke Emanuel was on to describe not only the biology of the virus, but what scientists at Johnson & Johnson are doing now to create a vaccine, and the various trials needed (safety, efficacy, and effectivemess).

They expect to start testing on humans in September, if all goes well.

A short video here, including animation about how the virus works:

msnbc DOT com/the-last-word/watch/researchers-hopeful-a-coronavirus-vaccine-will-be-available-next-year-82004037679

[Nightowlz]

---

@Anonymous032819 wrote:

The sooner an effective vaccine becomes available, the better.

Of course, you'll have  the anti-backers who will refuse to get it, and those who won't get it because they will want to see the "long term" effects of it.

 Just how long are they willing to wait?

Five years?

Ten?

Fifty?

---

@Anonymous032819 

I'm one of those "anti-backers". I'm not a guinea pig. I want to see what the side effects are before I take it. Nothing wrong with that.

I have more to say but the post would go poof so enough said. LOL!!!

[Jersey Born]

Any vaccine is going to take 18 months or longer to approve. Why?  Because certain respiratory diseases, like RSV and coronavirus, present a serious problem to vaccine developers.  Prior vaccines for these two viruses (and also for Dengue) caused a unique, troubling problem.  The vaccines caused enhanced immune response, aka antibody dependent enhancement.  This means that if a person is vaccinated, even if they develop robust antibodies to the virus, they are rendered more susceptible to the virus upon viral challenge than an unvaccinated person.  The Dengue vaccine in the Phillipines killed hundreds of Dengue-naive children who were vaccinated against Dengue, and then got sick with Dengue, with much greater viral replication in those vaccinated than in the children who were not vaccinated.  Apparently, when it comes to antibodies we generate from vaccines, neutralizing antibodies are good, while binding antibodies are bad. The prior coronavirus vaccine that failed to protect vaccinated animals from severe coronavirus infection after being exposed to wild coronavirus, produced binding antibodies, aka antibody dependent enhancement.

Then there was an old RSV vaccine that killed two children due to vaccine enhancement.  That vaccine was never approved for use in the full population.

Then, there was the coronavirus vaccine developed for SARS coronavirus, and it caused the same immune enhancement problem in ferrets and was pulled. 

So, if a vaccine created to fight coronavirus is not properly tested on animals, we will not know if it will cause greater viral replication in those who were vaccinated.  We will not know if there will be a tremendous increase in deaths from coronavirus in those who were vaccinated against the virus over those people who were not vaccinated against coronavirus.  Dr. Paul Offit, Dr. Peter Hotez, Z-Dogg MD (aka Dr. Zubin Damania), and Dr. Anthony Fauci are all concerned about the potential for vaccine manufacturers to produce a deadly coronavirus vaccine, and they are as pro-vaccine as can possibly be.  If they are concerned, we should all be concerned, too.  It is not enough for a vaccine to be tested for antibody development.  Safety is important, too, lest the "cure" be more dangerous than the virus itself. 

[Bri369]

You cannot rush these sorts of things.  Vaccines need to be proven safe before they're given out.  It could take several years for that.

I'm not about to jump on board with a vaccine until it's been proven safe. 

[pitdakota]

I am saying prayers that they will be successful in a relatively short period of time.  Also crossing fingers, legs, heck I will even do a rain dance ammended into a successful vaccine dance if necessary.

But the on the practical side, there still isn't a vaccine for SARS even though they have worked on it for around 17 years now.  

Some areas in Europe, China, and here in the U. S. are already in animal trials on some format of a vaccine.  So hopefully they are learning quite a bit.  And then we have the study conducted on humans that is taking place in Washington.

What is on our side this time, different than SARS or MERS, is that China isolated the strain quickly, obtained the genome & released the genome sequence to the world in early Jan.  That facilitated scientists to jump into researching a vaccine pretty quickly.

And due to the pandemic impacting so many countries there is quite a bit of funding out there to support the vaccine research and trials. 

And hopefully, research that has been conducted on working on a SARS vaccine can also be applied working on the vaccine for the 2019 novel strain of coronavirus.