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by Bill Sargent
December 8 was dubbed Vaccine Day in England. In a bit of understated British humor, William Shakespeare of Sussex received one of the first shots, while Donald Trump held his Vaccine Summit with in his usual overstated style.
The first thing the president did was sign a bill that made it illegal for companies to sell any vaccine to foreign countries until every American that wanted a shot had been inoculated. Afterwards, he outlined the quasi-military operation to distribute vaccine, syringes, dry ice, and freezers throughout the land.
It was noteworthy that nobody from either Moderna or Pfizer, the two top contenders to produce America’s vaccines, were at the ceremony.
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They said it was because they didn’t want to be part of a publicity stunt, but they also didn’t like being told to whom they could sell their products and were dismayed that the military could take over their operations if the president didn’t like how they were conducting their business.
But it was impressive that a vaccine had been produced so quickly. Normally, vaccines have only been discovered after a disease had reached herd immunity and was on the wane.
But virologists have pointed out that research on the vaccine has actually been going on since Chinese scientists identified that spikes were the Achilles’ heel of the SARS virus over 10 years before.
Then, by the time the novel COVID virus broke out, Dr. Zhang Yonzle had sequenced the virus. He sent the information to the West. The sequence pointed out that the way to develop a vaccine against the new virus was to target its spikes as well.
Dr. Zhang should be regarded as an international hero for supplying this life-saving information. Instead, he was removed from his laboratory.
Then something truly amazing occurred. When Moderna scientists received the gene sequence, they were able to make their COVID vaccine over a single January weekend — before Chinese officials had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from one human to another. Likewise, the United States had its successful vaccine before the first case of the disease had even been confirmed in this country.
This brings up an interesting question. Can clinical trials be streamlined so you can inoculate people before a pandemic surges?
As early as July, the entrepreneur Preston Estep had produced a DIY nasal spray vaccine that 70 scientists at Harvard and MIT had successfully administered to themselves before any clinical trials had been conducted.
One of the volunteers was the notoriously risk-prone celebrity scientist George Church, who wanted to use gene splicing to bring back wooly mammoths and display them in a tourist park in Siberia. And what could possibly go wrong with that?
You might think that the way to streamline the process for testing vaccines would be during the Phase Three efficacy trials, but some scientists think that you could actually do safety trials before a specific virus has even emerged. This is because you can produce vaccines against entire families of viruses that cause epidemics.
So, such vaccines could be produced and tested and be sitting on the shelf waiting to be deployed when a specific virus emerges. This is essentially the way flu vaccines are produced every year. Researchers simply tweak an existing vaccine platform to fit that year’s virus as soon as it is identified through gain-of-function research.
Dr. Florian Krammer, who did the serological work that identified the spread of COVID through the boroughs of New York City, published a paper in the journal Cell that argued that the whole process of testing could have potentially been compressed to three months — so it would have been completed by April 13.
That would have prevented 50 million cases, saved 225,000 lives, and avoided the second and third surges of the dreaded pandemic.
What is clear is that health officials will argue about the wisdom of streamlining vaccine trials for years to come.
Bill Sargent is a science writer and contributing columnist. His most recent book, Terror by Error? The Covid Chronicles, isavailable at Zenobia, Conley’s, Betsy Frost design, and through http://williamsargent.net, http://plumislandoutdoors.com and Amazon.
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December 18, 2020 at 06:11PM
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