Several COVID-19 vaccines are in the works, though one medical professional says a vaccine won’t likely be available until 2021.
Several COVID-19 vaccines are in the works, though one medical professional says a vaccine won’t likely be available until 2021.
Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale on Wednesday hosted Dr. William Klimstra with the University of Pittsburgh via Facebook Live to discuss COVID-19 vaccines.
Klimstra works in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Department at Pitt, is a member of the Center for Virus Research, and has been involved in several previous vaccine designs.
Since the end of January, Klimstra said his team of scientists and researchers have been tirelessly working on a COVID-19 vaccine.
“We were among the earliest to do this,” he said.
His team is currently working on three separate vaccines, but he said there are six or seven vaccines right now that are at the point of being in human clinical trials. Those undergoing human clinical trials would have to show initial safety of the vaccine and then efficacy after that, Klimstra said.
“The process really is that people had to identify a virus, know what the pieces of the virus they wanted to express in the vaccine look like, synthesize those in the laboratory and then immunize animals initially, and show first and foremost that the vaccine was safe,” he said.
Delays in getting vaccines into the market place are “mostly because of determining the safety of the vaccines,” Klimstra said. “Safety is foremost really at every level of the process.”
Coronaviruses are not new. In fact, Klimstra said they are “extremely diverse,” but COVID-19 is “more dangerous” than other similar viruses, like the flu.
Coronaviruses are found in many organisms, Klimstra said.
“There are whale coronaviruses and seal coronaviruses and hawk coronaviruses,” he said. “These have been known and existed for many, many years.”
Klimstra said the current coronavirus also likely originated from an animal, but then was mutated.
“What has happened with the current coronavirus is it was most likely a bat coronavirus that underwent some mutations in a particular setting, perhaps in one of these animal markets in China, and that mutation allowed it to grow in humans, which is one of the reasons why it is more dangerous than, for example, influenza,” he said.
While some folks tend to view the flu and the coronavirus as nearly the same, they are actually quite different, according to Klimstra.
“Influenza essentially has been circulating in humans for hundreds of years. Everybody has had exposure to a kind of influenza. When a new one comes along, even though you might get sick, you’re a little bit immune to it,” he said.
But the novel coronavirus COVID-19 is different.
“With this coronavirus, really people haven’t seen a virus like this before. They are completely unprotected from it, which is one of the reasons it gets more severe,” Klimstra said. “The coronavirus is one that just happens to do this kind of thing a lot, that has been understood from the original SARS outbreak ... that these things can jump between species.”
Klimstra said creating a vaccine is important because a virus of this magnitude is likely to return.
“This thing is likely to happen again,” he said. “We need to have things on the shelves — shelf-ready — to respond to this kind of outbreak, because it will happen again.”
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COVID-19 vaccines in the works, though likely still months away - Ellwood City Ledger
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