Why Covid-19 Vaccine Will Take A Long Time

Recently, a Boston- based biotech firm Moderna has started human trials of a vaccine against coronavirus. Now, this is extraordinary because they have skipped animal testing which h could have taken years. But even then we will have to wait for the coronavirus vaccine. But why that?  Hundreds of lab’s and thousands of scientists across the world are doing their best to make this vaccine in the shortest time possible. Which is both safe and effective?  Now related to this I have God News and  Bad News.

The bad news is that the vaccine will take around 14-18 months to get ready for commercial use. And now the good news is that this World has never been so ready and advanced to get a vaccine so quickly. All thanks to scientists and technological progress. But before we understand anything.

A vaccine is a substance that helps the body to get immunity against one or more diseases. It contains a weakened or dead form of the disease-causing organism. Okay in the easy language it works like that. A body is injected with something which is either weakened or dead form of the virus itself or a part of it. This helps the body to generate an immune response in response to it. This is done to ensure that when the actual virus attacks you, your immune system knows how to deal with it. A vaccine generates the memory for the immune system.

There is one type of vaccine where you are given the weakened or dead form of virus so as to generate an immune system or memory against the virus.( Weakened/ Dead virus)

And then there is a vaccine in which the protein or generate material of the virus is injected in your body. There are many stages for the development of a vaccine. In a normal scenario, it might take a year or even decades to develop a vaccine but in case of a pandemic like we are facing right now, we use all our resources to develop the vaccine as soon as possible.

There are many stages like it goes like:

• sequencing

• isolating the virus

• testing in labs

• testing on mice

• testing on non-human primates

• testing on human

Now all this is easy to say, but in reality, these vaccines take a lot of time. In fact, many vaccine di not enter these stages. And these are many other than that. You need to find volunteers, approval from the regulatory authorities, need to find the exact dosage.  They take millions of dollars of hunting. In the case of covid, we are lucky to have technology that will allow us to develop this vaccine in the shortest time possible.

Also, we have dealt with SARS and MERS outbreak in the past which helps us to develop a vaccine against coronavirus this time. So before we complain about the time it will take, we need to understand the efforts behind it. We all can help the scientific community by taking necessary precautions. Remember that we are in this together, so we have to take precautions. Please wash hands, maintain social distancing.