How are the Covid 19 vaccines progressing?
As February continues, more and more people are receiving Covid 19 vaccines. Teachers at the Waukegan schools will soon be receiving the vaccine, some already are getting it this week. None the less it is a slow process. Last month health care workers and elderly residents of nursing homes and of the community were inoculated. School staff and other front line workers are next. According to earlier plans, young people will be vaccinated over the summer.
There are quite a few vaccines available now, some from U.S. companies, some from China and Russia and others being developed in Europe. Vaccines often take approximately 8 years to develop but are now being approved at a much, much faster rate, in less than a year. The Russian vaccines, which are apparently effective, were approved without clinical trials or testing.
The funding for the vaccines is a combination of public and private investments. and before he left office President Trump created a program called operation warp speed which sped up the process of vaccine development and approval. Unfortunately there are new genetic variants of the Covid 19 virus, such as the one that emerged in South Africa and is now spreading around the globe. This vaccines already developed are unfortunately less effective against this new variant. In addition, some people are vaccine skeptics who don't want to get the immunization and others are afraid of side effects and may choose to delay or avoid getting the vaccine. These developments will slow down the process of vaccinating the public and returning to normal life.
Here is some further information on the vaccines from the Council on Foreign Relations:
- Governments, multilateral organizations, and private firms have spent billions of dollars to develop effective vaccines for the new coronavirus within one year.
- Close to a dozen vaccines—including ones by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, and Sinopharm—are already being distributed to tens of millions of people.
- Vaccines go through rigorous testing for safety and effectiveness before they are approved for public use, a process that typically takes years. (A Guide to Global COVID-19 Vaccine Efforts)
How does a vaccine work?
Traditionally, vaccines are dead or weakened virus molecules—known as antigens—that trigger defensive white blood cells in the immune system to create antibodies that bind to the virus and neutralize it.
There are four main types of conventional vaccines:
- live vaccines use a weakened form of the virus to prompt the creation of antibodies;
- inactivated vaccines use a dead version of the virus;
- toxoid vaccines use toxins made by the virus to produce immunity to the part of the virus that causes disease; and
- subunit, recombinant, polysaccharide, and conjugate vaccines use proteins or other pieces of the virus.
There are also several new types of vaccines that use the virus’s genetic material—DNA or RNA—to prompt the body to create antibodies. More than a dozen of the COVID-19 vaccine candidates that have gone to clinical trials are genetic-based, including those by U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and partnering German firm BioNTech and by U.S.-based Moderna. No vaccine of this kind had ever been approved for commercial use in humans before the COVID-19 pandemic.
When most of a population has been vaccinated and is immune to a particular disease, even those who are not immune are considered protected because the likelihood of an outbreak is small. This is known as herd immunity. Chicken pox, measles, mumps, and polio are all examples of diseases for which the United States has achieved herd immunity due to vaccines. Scientists are divided about how much of a population must have COVID-19 antibodies to prevent new outbreaks, with estimates ranging from less than half to over 80 percent. (A Guide to Global COVID-19 Vaccine Efforts)
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