WHO is optimistic about the great progress made …

The Geneva-based body practically resumed this week the annual meeting interrupted in May. While he received the news from Pfizer and BioNTech more sober than the stock markets, its CEO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was very optimistic.

200 laboratories for a vaccine

“As we expected, we will have a vaccine later this year. Pfizer shows great promise.” the Ethiopian proclaimed during meetings this week being held by teleconference with representatives of WHO’s 194 member countries.

The director of the health organization hopes that other alternative vaccines can be developed. He encouraged other laboratories to continue their research despite the fact that the project of the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, with the German biotechnology company BioNTech, is currently the best positioned.

Currently there are more than 200 laboratories in the world work on possible vaccines against Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causing covid-19, and at least 40 are in one of three phases of human clinical testing: the first typically has dozens of subjects, the second has hundreds, and the last has thousands.

Out of these 40, a dozen are in the third phase of testing. Among them are: that of Pfizer-BioNTech; those of the modern American; the one AstraZeneca is developing with the University of Oxford; three Chinese projects (two from Sinopharm and one from Sinovac, the latter being tested in control groups in Latin America).

The one developed by the Belgian pharmaceutical group is also in this last phase Janssen, from the American firm Johnson & Johnson, the North American Novavax or the Russian Sputnik V, which was greeted with some skepticism when President Vladimir Putin presented it to the world in August.

In this regard, Russian authorities said today that Sputnik V was found to be effective 92% of the time during the third phase of testing, according to the first test results released today.

In this sense, WHO has encouraged them all to continue their investigations even taking into account that some are more advanced than others. As a rule, with other diseases, only one in five applicants is successful.

In the same race against covid-19, there were several moments that generated discouragement, such as when testing of advanced propositions like those of AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson or Sinovac they had to be temporarily stopped due to side effects in the people who received them.

WHO and experts have clarified that this is a common setback, also in the search for other vaccines, a process that typically takes years but that due to the severity of the current pandemic, the scientific community is trying to cut it to a record time of just 12 o 18 months.

Innovation in epidemiology

Some of these candidates, like Pfizer-BioNtech or Moderna, use new technology never tested before in vaccines, called messenger RNA or mRNA and, be efficientThis would be a huge advance for epidemiology, which could perhaps be adapted against other diseases.

If, with traditional vaccines, individuals are inoculated with weakened forms of the virus so that the body makes antibodies, with this new technology only ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules are introduced which, by themselves, contain instructions with which the human body can produce the virus and at the same time the antibody that neutralizes it.

This technology presents a new problem which could hamper its desired mass production and worldwide distribution, as it must be stored at temperatures of around 70-80 degrees below zero.

At this week’s assembly of WHO It has already been noted that this might prevent them from reaching developing countries without these advanced cold storage systems, for example in regions heavily affected by the pandemic such as Latin America.

Another challenge

A still unknown for the new vaccines arriving against the virus is know if one or two doses will be enough to be vaccinated for life, as with those that protect against diseases such as whooping cough or chickenpox, or if it needs to be repeated regularly, as happens for example with the flu.

Covid-19, which became known in December 2019, is such a recent disease that it is impossible to know the long-term effects of a hypothetical vaccine against it.

The 90% efficacy demonstrated by the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine hypothetically means that one in ten people could still develop the disease symptomatically despite an inoculation, although the truth is that this percentage of reliability is common.

Even vaccines widely used today in health systems around the world show less effectiveness, such as influenza, which does not reach 50%, while chickenpox is 92% and measles 97%.