Coronavirus Covid-19 vaccine Crack Update 2021 {Latest}

The following day, perhaps suffering from the hangover of the initial euphoria, with the sobering realization that there is still a long way to go before any vaccine can be deemed successful, Moderna’s share price started to slide. We really need a vaccine. SARS-CoV-2, the pandemic coronavirus that causes covid-19 has infected over five million people globally. Ravaging much of Asia, Europe, and North America, it is now intensifying in South America and Africa. Because it is a new virus that spreads like wildfire, the only hope of ending the pandemic lies in a substantial portion of the global population developing some form of immunity.

The contenders:

Vaccine-watchers can take heart in knowing that there are now ten different vaccine candidates being tested on healthy volunteers. A further 114 are in earlier stages of development (including a handful by Indian companies). The top ten vaccines are in the stage where they’re being tested to see if they’re safe and if they actually can get an immune response. Then, more people will be vaccinated to see if the vaccines actually work. In the last hurdle, even more, people will be tested to get a clearer picture of whether the vaccine works in a diverse population. No vaccine has passed the second hurdle or gotten near the third hurdle yet, but the news so far is promising.

Four of the ten are inactivated vaccines, which contain actual virus particles that have been killed by chemicals. This is the basis for traditional vaccines that you and I have received for other diseases. Because they use actual viruses, the safety protocol is extensive. Of these four inactivated vaccines (all led by Chinese institutions), Sinovac Biotech Ltd has one which seems to be the furthest along the way.

The other six vaccines use experimental platforms that don’t actually need the virus. The downside is they’re very new and none of them have resulted in commercially available vaccines yet. So, there’s more limited experience with working with these systems. Such immunity can come from fighting and clearing the virus, but at least half of the world’s population, and perhaps up to 70% would need to be infected to acquire such “herd immunity”. And because of the significant lethality of the disease especially among certain vulnerable populations, experts believe the loss of life that would occur in order to get to herd immunity quickly would make this option broadly undesirable.

There’s another way to beat the virus with a much softer landing: a vaccine. That’s why there has never been a push for a vaccine like this in human history, using so many different, unique platforms. And all vaccine-makers want something called “sterilizing immunity” in which the vaccine prevents infection altogether.

Testing Bottlenecks:

During the briefing, speakers drew attention to other serious problems that pathology teams now face.

All complained of shortages in testing supplies that require them to manage two or more different testing platforms — an extremely inefficient and more expensive process — because they can’t always get the proprietary reagents needed for a given platform.

“Ideally, you would have one platform and duplicate that type of machine,” and train technicians on one set of procedures and have one economical maintenance contract, Godbey said.

But that’s no longer possible, “because today we can get reagents for platform one, but not for platform two,” while next week it may be the reverse. “We have learned to cope and adapt and do the best we can,” he said.

Wojewoda and Karger described it as “whack-a-mole.”

“As soon as we get one set of supplies, then it’s another set of supplies that we can’t get our hands-on,” said Wojewoda. “Right now, we’re very concerned that we can’t get pipette tips that have a certain filter in them to transfer patient samples into the tubes that we need or the plates that we need to do the testing. If we can’t get the patient sample into where it needs to go, safely, without contaminating other patient samples, that’s a big issue.”

Inside the race to crack the Covid-19 vaccine:

Anirban Mahapatra

• It’s early days but there are promising signs about vaccines to tackle covid-19. Here’s all you need to know.
• Getting a vaccine that works is only half the battle. We also have to ensure that 8 billion people, of which 1.4 billion are Indians, can get vaccinated rapidly

Key Highlights of Coronavirus Vaccine: