It is not very often when a politician deflects powerful business interests to do the right thing for his constituents. However, in California Governor Gavin Newsome has done that. He extended the lockdown for California until mid-July. This at the least will allow for an accurate testing program to begin. It is essential that we not resume normal activities until we know scientifically what the coronavirus penetration in our communities. In California, there was only one rural county without the virus present.
Back to work returning to work will take place gradually and not across entire states or the entire country. President Trump is throwing the country under the bus by his ridiculous statements. We are fortunate that some Governors are enforcing more reasonable steps in their states and following scientific protocols to protect their citizens responsibly.
These remarks which follow are from The Gate's Notes, a blog written by Bill Gates, former CEO of Microsoft and now co-head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates is one of the supporters to eliminate AIDs and Ebola in Africa. His knowledge base comes from global experience with epidemics, and his success rate of dwelling those two catastrophic illnesses o humanity. Cool heads must prevail across the world.
Our problem in the United States is not a unique one. Countries with far fewer resources make our situation look easy.
Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus. Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine. We need to make billions of doses, we need to get them out to every part of the world, and we need all of this happen as quickly as possible.
That sounds daunting because it is. Our foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world, and this effort dwarfs anything we’ve ever worked on before. It’s going to require a global cooperative effort like the world has never seen. But I know it’ll get done. There’s simply no alternative.
The world is creating this vaccine on a historically fast timeline.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has said he thinks it’ll take around eighteen months to develop a coronavirus vaccine. I agree with him, though it could be as little as 9 months or as long as two years.
Although eighteen months might sound like a long time, this would be the fastest scientists have created a new vaccine. Development usually takes around five years. Once you pick a disease to target, you have to create the vaccine and test it on animals. Then you begin testing for safety and efficacy in humans.
Safety and efficacy are the two most important goals for every vaccine. Safety is exactly what it sounds like: is the vaccine safe to give to people? Some minor side effects (like a mild fever or injection site pain) can be acceptable, but you don’t want to inoculate people with something that makes them sick.
Efficacy measures how well the vaccine protects you from getting sick. Although you’d ideally want a vaccine to have 100 percent efficacy, many don’t. For example, this year’s flu vaccine is
around 45 percent effective.
To test for safety and efficacy, every vaccine goes through three phases of trials:
- Phase one is the safety trial. A small group of healthy volunteers gets the vaccine candidate. You try out different dosages to create the strongest immune response at the lowest effective dose without serious side effects.
- Once you’ve settled on a formula, you move onto phase two, which tells you how well the vaccine works in the people who are intended to get it. This time, hundreds of people get the vaccine. This cohort should include people of different ages and health statuses.
- Then, in phase three, you give it to thousands of people. This is usually the longest phase, because it occurs in what’s called “natural disease conditions.” You introduce it to a large group of people who are likely already at the risk of infection by the target pathogen, and then wait and see if the vaccine reduces how many people get sick.
After the vaccine passes all three trial phases, you start building the factories to manufacture it, and it gets submitted to the WHO and various government agencies for approval.
This process works well for most vaccines, but the normal development timeline isn’t good enough right now. Every day we can cut from this process will make a huge difference to the world in terms of saving lives and reducing trillions of dollars in economic damage.
So, to speed up the process, vaccine developers are compressing the timeline. This graphic shows how:
In the traditional process, the steps are sequential to address key questions and unknowns. This can help mitigate financial risk, since creating a new vaccine is expensive. Many candidates fail, which is why companies wait to invest in the next step until they know the previous step was successful.
For COVID-19, financing development is not an issue. Governments and other organizations (including our foundation and an amazing alliance called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have made it clear they will support whatever it takes to find a vaccine. So, scientists are able to save time by doing several of the development steps at once. For example, the private sector, governments, and our foundation are going to start identifying facilities to manufacture different potential vaccines. If some of those facilities end up going unused, that’s okay. It’s a small price to pay for getting ahead on production.
Fortunately, compressing the trial timeline isn’t the only way to take a process that usually takes five years and get it done in 18 months. Another way we’re going to do that is by testing lots of different approaches at the same time.
There are dozens of candidates in the pipeline.
As of April 9, there are 115 different COVID-19 vaccine candidates in the development pipeline. I think that eight to ten of those look particularly promising. (Our foundation is going to keep an eye on all the others to see if we missed any that have some positive characteristics, though.)
The two priorities, as I mentioned earlier, are safety and efficacy. Since we might not have time to do multi-year studies, we will have to conduct robust phase 1 safety trials and make sure we have good real-world evidence that the vaccine is completely safe to use.
We have a bit more wiggle room with efficacy. I suspect a vaccine that is at least 70 percent effective will be enough to stop the outbreak. A 60 percent effective vaccine is useable, but we might still see some localized outbreaks. Anything under 60 percent is unlikely to create enough herd immunity to stop the virus.
The big challenge will be making sure the vaccine works well in older people. The older you are, the less effective vaccines are. Your immune system—like the rest of your body—ages and is slower to recognize and attack invaders. That’s a big issue for a COVID-19 vaccine, since older people are the most vulnerable. We need to make sure they’re protected.
The shingles vaccine—which is also targeted to older people—combats this by amping up the strength of the vaccine. It’s possible we do something similar for COVID, although it might come with more side effects. Health authorities could also ask people over a certain age to get an additional dose.
Once we have a vaccine, though, we still have huge problems to solve. That’s because…
We need to manufacture and distribute at least 7 billion doses of the vaccine.
In order to stop the pandemic, we need to make the vaccine available to almost every person on the planet. We’ve never delivered something to every corner of the world before. And, as I mentioned earlier, vaccines are particularly difficult to make and store.
There’s a lot we can’t figure out about manufacturing and distributing the vaccine until we know what exactly we’re working with. For example, will we be able to use existing vaccine factories to make the COVID-19 vaccine?
What we can do now is build different kinds of vaccine factories to prepare. Each vaccine type requires a different kind of factory. We need to be ready with facilities that can make each type so that we can start manufacturing the final vaccine (or vaccines) as soon as we can. This will cost billions of dollars. Governments need to quickly find a mechanism for making the funding for this available. Our foundation is currently working with CEPI, the WHO, and governments to figure out the financing.
Part of those discussions center on who will get the vaccine when. The reality is that not everyone will be able to get the vaccine at the same time. It’ll take months—or even years—to create 7 billion doses (or possibly 14 billion, if it’s a multi-dose vaccine), and we should start distributing them as soon as the first batch is ready to go.
Most people agree that health workers should get the vaccine first. But who gets it next? Older people? Teachers? Workers in essential jobs?
Another moral and ethical dilemma exists. Which countries will get the first doses of vaccine? History has demonstrated that the wealthy countries and people will be favored by sheer economics. How would the United States deal with that? America has always stepped up to support WHO efforts for global health initiatives. Are we up to that task now given our current economic collapse. We cannot afford to say no because we would be harming ourselves. America has a very small percentage of the global population of over 7 billion human lives. A worldwide outbreak again would easily be transmitted to the U.S. unless and if we were willing to isolate our country from the rest of the world.
The world has other significant financial resources: The Gavi Vaccine Alliance Even social media platforms such as TikTok are donating considerable sums to the effort
Harnessing Social Media for the COVID-19 Pandemic
Milton visiting Galileo in the prison of the Inquisition. Credit: Tony Baggett Getty Images
Galileo's Lessons for Living and Working Through a Plague
The person who returns to work and finds someone in his or her household will have a never-ending sense of despair which will last far longer than any financial effects of being locked in.
Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus.
What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine | Bill Gates:
