When Will There Be A Vaccine To COVID-19

By Safa Ghanem

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Knowing when we will return to life as we used to know it is on the forefront of everyone’s minds with Boris Johnson recently saying the ‘only feasible long-term solution’ to bring the coronavirus to an end and for our lives to go back to what we call ‘normal’ is for an effective vaccine to be produced. So what we all want to know is when will this vaccine be rolled out?

Before we delve into the details of how vaccines are produced it will help to know some basic immunology terms in case your biology GCSE lessons are too much of a distant memory. A vaccine is a method of preventing infection by introducing a bit of the virus into your body allowing your body to recognise it as a foreign entity and produce its own immune response in case of future infection. When we are vaccinated it causes our body to produce antibodies - y shaped proteins made by our immune system which attach themselves to the antigens on the surface of the virus to trigger the immune response to fight the virus. One way of achieving this is by producing T-cells (white blood cells) which help control the immune system. They can spot which body cell has been infected and destroys these cells.

Currently across the world there are approximately 170 candidates racing for the development of the coronavirus vaccine, with over 10 of them already in human trials. The team from the University of Oxford have been the most successful so far. The vaccine is called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 – catchy right? The vaccine is made from a genetically engineered virus that causes the common cold in chimpanzees; it is then modified to avoid infecting the people themselves while still looking like the coronavirus. This is achieved by transferring the genetic instructions for the spike protein, which is the virus’ means for invading cells, to the vaccine being developed. The vaccine resembles the corona virus and so the immune system can learn how to attack it. The results released showed both antibodies and T-cells were produced in the 1077 adults tested as a response to the vaccine which is extremely promising - showing that levels of T-cells in patients peaked 14 days after vaccination and antibodies peaked after 28 days. Unfortunately, the study has not gone on long enough to show how long these remain in your system. 91% of patients produced neutralising antibodies which disable the virus after 1 dose. 10 people so far have been given 2 doses and all produced neutralising antibodies. Vaccines often come with negative side effects. In this case, 70% of patients developed a fever, muscle ache or fatigue but these are common for all vaccines and nothing more dangerous has been reported so far.

Most experts think the vaccine is likely to become available by the middle of 2021. This is a very quick turnaround for a vaccine, and if it is a success, will be a huge scientific achievement. When experts say that a Covid-19 vaccine may be prepared by the end of 2020, they are talking about an emergency use vaccine, not a fully approved one. Vaccine development is broken into several stages, each with a varying timescale so no one can say for sure when the vaccine may arrive. For context, the fastest ever vaccine developed was for mumps – this took 4 years to develop though! Typically, vaccine development takes 10-15 years so a vaccine by 2021 would be record-breaking.

If we are lucky, we will be returning to life without masks by next year with one of the greatest scientific achievements to date, but if history is anything to go by 2021 may be a bit too optimistic.

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Key Takeaways

· Vaccines work by giving your body a small bit of the virus

· University of Oxford vaccine most successful so far

· Vaccine could be ready by 2021 which is a record but that would be very optimistic