President Duterte himself said that, in the absence of a vaccine, it is useless to propose a roadmap from the great damage caused by COVID-19. In his confrontation with the State of the Nation last Monday, he came out of the script to announce that he had made a plea to Chinese leader Xi Jinping: “If they have the vaccine, can they afford to be one of the first or if necessary, if we have to buy it, that we obtain credits so that we can normalize as temporally as possible”.
Duterte would possibly be one of the few world leaders, and U.S. President Donald Trump is the loudest of them, whose strategy to manage the existing pandemic and its myriad consequences is entirely based on the discovery of a vaccine. They seem almost as if their political survival was based on the deployment of this vaccine before the end of the year, no later.
The University of Chicago epidemiologist and evolutionary biologist Sarah Cobey says that while the COVID-19 pandemic is “a different and very new situation,” we can be very informed from the course of pandemics beyond. What happens depends on two things: first, how the pathogen evolves; and second, how humans respond in biological and social terms.
Some viruses seem in the human population with so much novelty that they can escape the attention of the immune formula. This is SARS-CoV-2. Its unique characteristics allow it to anchor well in human cells and use those cells to multiply. Taken by surprise, the immune formula can paint twice as much to produce enough antibodies to prevent the invading virus. But instead of killing the virus, the immune reaction itself can make the disease worse.
The social reaction is not much different. The virus can already spread silently within communities before being detected. Instead of preventing the virus, blind locks and maintenance orders can provide the virus with ideal situations to multiply.
Poor control and lack of coordination, aggravated by the asymmetrical and inconsistent application of serious containment measures, can lead to public mistrust over the wisdom of government responses. As a result, others would likely feel compelled to violate draconian restrictions and risk becoming infected, rather than starving.
As if human responses to pathogens and pandemics were not confusing enough, viruses are charged to complexity by continuous silencing as they encounter other environments. The most productive vaccines are the ones that can be up-to-date to control these mutations. Granting long-term immunity is rarely a distinguishing feature of vaccines, especially those that develop rapidly. But, seeing how this pandemic is destroying human society everywhere, even a short-term vaccine that has proven safe and effective will be a wonderful blessing.
No one knows exactly where this vaccine will come from. The progression of the vaccine is highly appreciated and requires years of thorough studies and progression before a product is licensed. Many promising candidates are left behind, away from the finish line. Those who persist might eventually find that the market is no longer there because the epidemic has been contained. The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 ended when herbal infections granted immunity to those who recovered, having inflamed 500 million people and killing more than 50 million. The virus circulated as a seasonal virus for another 40 years, until some other strain of the influenza virus repelled it.
There is more data on what is happening in Pfizer/BioNTech labs and a small company called Moderna. Currently in a phase 3 trial, the Moderna vaccine would be in a position to be approved and approved as soon as the effects of summer trials are known. If all goes well, final approval is expected between September and October this year. Mass production of the vaccine may take a few more months. Governments that have complex cash to fund these efforts will actually get the first batch of vaccine for their own citizens.
Assuming that one of China’s 3 vaccine applicants reaches the target in September or October, a December deployment to the Philippines, as President Duterte hopes, is unrealistic. Unless you just think of the country as a vaccine test in China.
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