Arriving at an effective vaccine for the coronavirus remains a coveted prize and the path is long and painful. This is not to downplay the Pfizer and BioNtech (American-German) vaccine that the world has been cheering for and which caused invigorated the stock market, but to say that in the underbelly of every optimism-inspiring piece of news are strong warnings about the hurdles to our aspirations’ fruition.
This is especially true of vaccine trials, which are often marked by constant fluctuation and surprises. Although sensible scientists, since the beginning of the pandemic, have been warning that these tests need time and no vaccine would emerge before a year and a half, corporations have not tired of bombarding us for months. They continue to send out messages about the proximity of its production and distribution date, impressive success stories and the countries that have reserved millions of doses.
There are reasons and justifications for this behavior. We are not shaming the governments who are waging frantic wars against bankruptcy and collapse and searching for a way out. Nor are we shaming the pharmaceutical companies promoting their vaccines. The profits are in the billions, and everyone wants to book their place in this historic global race and win a share of its material rewards. Nevertheless, excessive optimism doesn’t solve the problem, and spreading false hope could have dangerous repercussions.
A few days ago, the Pfizer and BioNtech vaccine was designated our savior and placed on the throne of vaccinations. Before it, Oxford was in the lead, and before either of them, we had heard about Sputnik. It passed all the trials with flying colors and was being distributed; Vladimir Putin’s daughter herself was among those who had been vaccinated.
Pfizer considers its vaccine to be 90% effective, although the duration of the immunity from the virus by people who take the vaccine remains ambiguous. What if it only lasted a few days or a month? How are we to be optimistic while we don’t know whether or not the vaccine prevents transmission of the virus? There are also no answers to questions about the extent of its efficacy for the elderly, who are usually less responsive to vaccines than youths.
Will we have the answer to such questions and solutions to these problems in two months? In the midst of all of this obscurity, can the vaccine be marketed at the exorbitant price of up to $30? Can governments pay the astronomical costs of transporting the vaccine and storing it at a temperature of minus 80 degrees before injecting everyone twice in 21 days? How many countries will vaccinate their citizens?
My intention is not to shatter illusions; people want salvation, but fantasies won’t bring about solutions. More important is the question about the value of a vaccine available to some and elusive to others in an open world where the distance between continents has been eviscerated. Would the virus not reignite and spread faster than wildfire?
There have been many vaccine trials; some have even said over a hundred had been conducted. Others put the number at 40, limiting them to those that reach advanced stages. According to the World Health Organization, there have only been nine. These all need many experiments. But it appears that US oversight agencies, given the extraordinary conditions the country is experiencing, will issue emergency approval for one or more vaccines as soon as they are confident of the initial results as experiments are ongoing.
The Russians went further, registering their vaccine in August. They approved it and considered it fit for circulation, another gamble worth looking into.
As the virus spreads at a rate similar to that which the world had seen in April and as everyone suffers pandemic fatigue, it isn’t at all comforting to realize that many aspects of the virus remain a mystery. The debate on how long the virus can live on surfaces is ongoing. This answer should be simple, but it hasn’t, in any sense, been resolved. New bewildering symptoms emerge and prompt further research and disagreements about different antibiotics’ effectiveness and which treatments ought to be dropped because of the gravity of their side effects. At what rate is the coronavirus contracted twice? Is the second infection more or less dangerous than the first?
Injecting humanity with a vaccine and adopting it hurriedly before we understand the virus better because of psychological and economic pressures seems like crime more grave and dangerous than the virus itself.
The Spanish Flu pandemic ended after two years, during which it infected a third of the world’s population. The world was primitive compared to today, and no vaccine was found. Indeed, it is said that we carry its latent genes and that they emerge from time to time without us noticing. While qualitative scientific advances have been made over the past hundred years, humanity is living through a lethal epidemic under the weight of globalization and its deceptive advertising for the first time. The fear is that the scientists in today’s laboratories are under a degree of pressure that their predecessors did not experience. Indeed, the stress is unprecedented, while scientific research requires calm observation, deliberation and deduction.
Vaccines have become politicized and subjected to competing bids that undermine medical science progress. The US president wanted a vaccine to be found at any cost in order to win the elections. Putin rushed to introduce his vaccine, to finish in first place. Every pharmaceutical manufacturer seeks the lion’s share of the profits of an inevitably preliminary vaccine that will not necessarily be safe for use when it is sold while it is being tested.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro - despite his extreme positions - may be one of the few who has taken a cautious approach to the vaccine campaigns. He decided not to buy the vaccine because “the Brazilian people will not be anyone’s guinea pig,” adding that a vaccine that is being tested does not warrant billions of dollars.
But man loves hope, and sometimes hope leads him to fall into traps.
