It’s been spoken about for months, and yet we’re in the same place we were at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Where is the vaccine and what types of vaccines will there be?
It seems we have a cure for anything and everything. Coconut Oil can fix any malady, children receive a cocktail of vaccines for previously lethal diseases before they get the chance to become infected, and there are more over-the-counter drugs than it would ever be possible to communicate.
So why can’t we figure this out?
For lack of a better explanation – science. The sciences of immunology, virology, pathology, epidemiology all make the creation of a vaccine for a virus of COVID-19’s nature more complicated and difficult than that of other diseases.
Why don’t we have cures for SARS, MERS, AIDS, or any of our other sinister acronymed viruses?
For the same reason we don’t have a cure for COVID. Viruses are hardy, resistant, and intensely adaptable. It takes a lot to kill one, even more to create a vaccine. But it has been done, and it can be done many times more.
Let’s take a look at some of the more promising vaccine possibilities and how they might change the way we handle future pandemics.
Viruses & Types of Vaccines
To understand how vaccines work, you have to understand how viruses work. They can’t just be treated with an antibiotic and excreted by the body.
This is because of the way viruses infect. Bacteria is an external organism that invades, proliferates, and kills. If you can target them specifically, you can eradicate the infection.
Our immune systems are even built to isolate and destroy these foreign invaders, which is why a lot of the time when you feel ill you don’t need to go to the doctor. You just drink a lot of water, get a lot of rest, take some OTCs, and keep on keepin’ on.
But viruses aren’t so straightforward. They use RNA – which is what our own bodies use to create proteins from the data stored in DNA – to infiltrate the body’s already-existing mechanisms. This means that to kill a cell infected with a virus, you have to kill one of the body’s cells.
Viruses hijack cells and use them to trick the body into making more just like them. In doing so, they create an army of virus cells that fool a person’s natural immune response into thinking they’re just another part of the body.
This means that a virus can reproduce sufficiently to infect a person before the immune system can catch wind of it. And often once the immune system does, it begins destroying every virulent cell it can find. Unfortunately the virus’s host cells are the organism’s body cells, and we need those.
The trick is to be able to isolate the virus from the body’s cells. How can you tell a body’s immune system to kill only one part of a cell? How can you tell a medication to eradicate only the quark-length parasite using the host cell’s mitochondria as a virus factory?
If we knew the answer, we’d have a cure for AIDS, cancer, COVID-19, and a host of other diseases that have plagued the human race for eons. It seems the best defense we’ve come up with is just that – bolstering the body’s natural defense mechanisms to prevent the virulent infection from ever becoming dangerous.
By introducing the virus in tiny, innocuous (harmless) dosages, you can prep the body’s immune system for a full-fledged infection by familiarizing it with the virus so that it can make T-cells specifically to target and eradicate the organisms before they can reproduce.
But you’ve got to know about a virus to be able to vaccinate against it, and that’s the information gap we’re trying to bridge right now.
Who is Most Likely to Get COVID?
Unfortunately this is another difficult element of the COVID puzzle. Most viruses have target hosts that make the spread of the infection easier within the human system. Typically this is people who are older, very young, or immunocompromised in some way.
Initially it was the elderly. Then people with preexisting conditions, then younger children, then men, then young adults, and now it seems anyone can get COVID-19. There are now even confirmed cases of reinfection.
If we can’t be certain who is most susceptible to COVID-19, it’s on all of us to ensure the most vulnerable members of our society don’t get infected. This means wearing a mask no matter how long you’ll be out of the car, how you feel, where you’ve been, or who you’ve been around. Without being certain who will get it, you can’t be certain the people around you are safe.
Promising Vaccines for COVID
This is what we’re here to talk about. Without being certain of the pathology of the virus – or how it’s spread from person to person – it’s difficult to create a vaccine that can prepare the body against an inevitable infection.
If you inhale it, should you inhale the vaccine like gimsilumab reported Riovan creating? If it infects the bloodstream through your eyes, ears, or mouth, should you inject it? If it’s digested through your stomach acid and processed through the body, should it be a pill?
Let’s take a look at some of the more promising options by breaking them down by type.
Inactivated Vaccine
An inactivated vaccine contains dead or inert virus specimens and teaches the body to recognize the virus as an invader. Inactivated vaccines in use today include the polio, rabies, and hepatitis A vaccines. They’re among the oldest, most tried-and-true methods of vaccination, and have shown promise in early clinical trials.
Subunit Vaccines
Subunit vaccines are like inactivated vaccines in that they use a specific part of the virus to teach your immune system to fight the microbe. In COVID-19, you can use the spike protein specifically to create a vaccine. We’ve created the HPV vaccine in this way.
Weakened, Live Virus Vaccine
A weakened virus is one that’s been artificially grown in a lab setting using cells that are different from human cells. As the virus becomes stronger and stronger in a lab, it becomes less and less capable of infecting human cells. Once pathologists are certain it won’t cause harm to the people it’s given to, they’ll create a vaccine using those strains.
Replicating Viral Vector (RVV) Vaccine
In this case, scientists will take a microbe that will not affect humans and insert DNA from a strain of a virulent disease to trick the body into treating the organism as a foreign invader. The body begins to replicate the organism and your immune system beg doing so, they’re able to make the body recognize the virus as a threat without actually ever putting the body at risk.
Weakened and RVV vaccines are sometimes lumped into the category of genetically modified vaccines. They require a form of genetic modification or extraction, and thus aren’t simply live or inactivated forms of a single, unmodified organism.
What Will the COVID Vaccine Likely Look Like?
For a very long time, vaccines have been required to be “safe and effective” as according to the CDC. This means that a vaccine has to pass certain safety standards for lack of side effects and have a threshold for effectiveness that exceeds the possible (limited) side effects of the drugs.
This means that the vaccine will likely take the form of one of the aforementioned vaccines, whether a harmless form of the total microorganism or a small part of the virus. These forms of vaccines have been in use for almost as long as vaccines themselves, and have been tested in so many situations over so many years that their effectiveness and safety are unquestionable.
The fact of the matter is that – like AIDS – COVID-19 changes based upon the host in which it replicates. This is because of the way COVID works, and the fact that it uses its host cells to create new copies of itself. This means that the virus replicates using part of the host’s own DNA and thus becomes as unique as the person it infects once it becomes ingratiated within the system.
This makes creating a vaccine complicated. As many of us know, the flu vaccine we get every year actually contains not one or two, but up to fifteen strains of the flu. They’re the most common strains, but the flu vaccine isn’t perfect and you can still get rarer strains despite being protected against the majority of them.
Do We Have a COVID Vaccine Timeline?
The difficult thing about vaccines is that they target and trigger very sensitive and influential parts of the human anatomy. As such, it’s important to be responsible in the creation of vaccines. They must be thoroughly researched, diligently studied, and meticulously tested.
In most cases, vaccines take years to create. They’ll typically start in the lab, then move to animal trials, then human trials. Assuming all of this goes right, the vaccine then becomes available to the public.
In cases like these, the CDC can skip certain steps in the process of creating a vaccine. They’ve given wide permissions to drug companies and pharmaceutical agents in order to assist in the establishment of a new vaccine.
The problem with vaccines is that they can only prepare an immune system for a future infection. The sad fact of the matter is that there is nothing that can be done about the hundreds of thousands of people that are currently in the throes of a coronavirus infection.
Has There Ever Been a COVID Vaccine?
Well unfortunately, there hasn’t ever been a COVID-19. After all, the “19” in COVID-19 refers to December 2019 when the novel strain of the virus was identified. Therefore, there can’t possibly already be a COVID-19 vaccine.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t any hope! SARS and MERS are also artificial diseases that originated in the Wuhan province of China, and we’ve been able to make a lot of progress in those areas. Ideally due to the similarity of the diseases we’ll be able to derive the vaccine for COVID-19 from one of those treatments.
What Are the Biggest Barriers to the COVID-19 Vaccine?
We all wish it was a simple answer. There ae a multitude of things that affect any endeavor on the scale that the COVID-19 health crisis has taken on. Though we all wish they were only scientific barriers, and that once the discovery is made it’ll be smooth sailing from that point forward, there are a lot of social and political factors that influence the ability of scientists to be able to create a vaccine.
For example, misinformation runs rampant about the legitimacy of the COVID-29 health crisis as a whole. If you can’t convince people that a virus exists, how can you possibly expect them to take a active role in the thwarting of this virus on an international scale?
If we didn’t need everyone to participate tin this cure, it would be endlessly easier to formulate a vaccine. But it’s necessary to keep the number of infected persons at a manageable level to keep the virus from branching into new strains and becoming more and more adaptable to the human immune system. We’d need everyone in the world to decide to be mindful of the situation, and with the variety of political situations and access to credible information, it’s next to impossible.
Never mind the political situations in the countries harboring active infections, there are dozens of scientific and economic obstacles to overcome in creating and distributing a vaccine.
Once we’re able to make it – whenever that might be – we’ll have to get it to the people who need it. Easier said than done, as 60% of unvaccinated children are from 10 countries. Despite this no other health technology, not even antibiotics, has had such a major effect on human mortality.
Vaccine News and You
It can seem overwhelming to try to find information about COVID online. It seems like Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Fox, and other political and personal social media sites have become a cesspool of misinformation, hatred, and childishness.
But it’s important for people to take personal accountability in the fight against COVID. If you haven’t felt the personal sting of COVID in your life, don’t be fooled into thinking it isn’t a big deal. People are losing jobs, losing family members, losing lives, so we have to expand our thinking to include people outside of our own situations, or we’re all done for.
The vaccine is coming, but until then we have to do what we can to slow the spread of COVID and make it as easy as possible for the scientists and pathologists working day and night to discover a vaccine for COVID to do just that.
This means wearing our masks, washing our hands, making sure to social distance, minimizing our trips outside the house, and keeping group gatherings to a minimum.
Don’t wait for any types of vaccines and do what you can to stop the spread of coronavirus. Check out our blog page for more news about how to live your life safely and successfully today!