US Cases: 5,279,863*
US Deaths: 160,155*
Worldwide Cases: 21,070,842*
Worldwide Deaths: 763,070*
* - Numbers are a lower bound. True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration
It's Friday. So maybe we should end the week with some positive news?
As urgency mounts for a Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine, a key question for scientists is whether this pandemic will be the watershed moment for two new technologies that have never before seen widespread use in humans. If proven effective, these approaches could dramatically speed up the development of other new vaccines and drastically lower costs, heralding a new era in the fight against infectious disease.The main technologies gaining traction are vaccines that use an adenovirus vector and mRNA. Rather than construct a new vaccine from scratch, the idea behind these technologies is to use a standard set of parts, like a repurposed virus or a nanoparticle, to carry genetic material into a cell. That material — DNA or RNA — can then code for specific proteins from a virus.Once one of these delivery platforms are proven safe, it’s just a matter of tweaking DNA and RNA strands. That’s much faster than conventional vaccines, which involve culturing large quantities of viruses that are then weakened, inactivated, or separated into tiny fragments and purified — processes that require years of cumbersome trial-and-error and safety testing.
Early days still. But if one wants to be optimistic, it's possible that the race to find a #COVID19 vaccine will help to develop techniques to obtain vaccines much more quickly for future diseases.
Possibly.
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