In February 2003 we had a first warning. SARS, a coronavirus detected in Asia, spread to 24 countries in America, Europe and Asia, before being stopped in July 2003.
Then MERS appeared in the Middle East. Due to its characteristics (originated in camels and transmited by very close contact, in hospitals) it didn´t become a global threat.
In January 2020, the first pandemic in a century finally arrived, caused by SARS-CoV-2. As has been said in this blog, it generated a triple crisis: in health, economics and leadership, all of them interconnected and reciprocally fed back.
In a year and a half, more than 170 million people have been infected and more than three and a half million deaths recorded (some calculations take that figure to 10-13 million when analyzing the surplus of reported deaths compared to previous years). Global economy contraction is estimated at 3.5%, the biggest peacetime decline in more than a century.
In this bleak context, science and technology became our hope. Rand rightfully so.
Sharing information and publishing material, the scientific community dedicated to fully exploiting the knowledge infrastructure accumulated since the last pandemic (Spanish flu of 1918) about antibody measurement, evaluation of its functioning in the viral system, life cycle of the virus, etc., to produce a coordinated response.
And it did so at unprecedented speed. Sequencing the genetic code for SARS in 2003 took three months. In 2020, decoding the one for COVID-19 took just a few days. Three months later, the first vaccines began their clinical trials. In just one year, the first vaccines were approved for emergency use in many countries.
Today we have more than fifteen vaccines, using different technologies.
Inactivated virus vaccines Adenovirus vector vaccines
Sinopharm (BBIBP) Oxford-AstraZeneca
Sinopharm (WIBP) Sputnik V
Coronvac Sputnik light
Covaxin Johnson & Johnson
Covivac Convidecia
QazCovid-in
Protein subunit vaccines RNA messenger vaccines
EpiVacCorona Pfizer-BioNTech
RBD-Dimer Moderna
Some advances, such as vaccines using messenger RNA, are truly amazing. In few months of 2020, science was able to synthesize and apply research that took decades, in order to develop new vaccines.
Basically, messenger RNA is a molecule that “bridges” the genetic information contained in a cell’s DNA, from its nucleus to its plasma, where it is translated into proteins.
With this technology, vaccines that use messenger RNA instruct the human body to produce the “spike” protein, located on the surface of the virus, triggering the generation of antibodies that reject COVID-19. As you can see, you do not need to inject an attenuated version of the virus into the body, as traditional vaccination technology does.
RNA is unstable and it is not easy to work with. With the help of nanotechnology, scientists managed to deposit it in a small lipid particle, to later design a version of that nanoparticle that could be safely injected into humans.
Innovations in synthetic biology did the rest, making a key contribution to developing vaccine production based on this technique.
The RNA messenger is an extraordinary achievement. It promises unexpected applications in a short time. It could even make possible faster new vaccines development.
More vaccines, of better quality, applied through effective vaccination plans, offer prospects for the recovery of the economy and our freedoms. Almost 2 billion doses have been applied in less than 6 months.
We were right to trust our hopes in science. It lived up to expectations and has been able to bring about changes that cut across physical and knowledge boundaries.
Once again, it offers us the opportunity to think about a better future. And make SARS-CoV-2 the latest pandemic.
