What You Need To Know About COVID-19 Vaccines & Vaccination

The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, without a shred of doubt, has been the biggest highlight of the year 2020 and perhaps by a large mile the most significant global event since the turn of the millennium.

A pathogenic factor rumoured to be the product of an experiment which started at the Wuhan Province in China, swept through the global space like a plague, leaving death and destruction in its wake.

Being an entirely new disease that was engineered to evade every known medical remedy, different countries of the world had to initiate lockdown procedures as containment strategy while global support was mobilised in order to quickly develop a potent vaccine to combat the virus.

But then, it did not also help that the stipulated standard for developing any vaccine for human trial would realistically take years to hash out the kinks of clinical trials; a length of time which was utterly unacceptable, especially given the rate which the virus was killing in some parts of the world.

Prior to this time, more than 150 COVID-19 vaccines were being developed across the globe, and there were high hopes of bringing one to the market in record time to ease the global crisis.

There was perhaps a tinge of hope that due to the urgency of the situation created by the outbreak of the pandemic, that the process of clinical trials would be accelerated to accommodate the exigency and make the vaccine readily available before the idea of living with a global pandemic would become the new normal; but again, developing this much elusive vaccine was projected to take a significant length of time since initial experimentations did not yield many promising results.

Typically, it can typically take 10 to 15 years to bring a vaccine to market; the fastest ever- the vaccine for mumps, required four years in the 1960s. This is because vaccines go through a three-stage clinical trial process before they are sent to regulatory agencies for approval, which can be a lengthy process itself.

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In what has been a very swift response to a global crisis, a COVID-19 vaccine is finally here, as the U.K Government officially announced that Pfizer, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, based in New York, in collaboration with German biotech company BioNTech, has finally engineered a proven coronavirus vaccine.

As gathered by Eko Hot Blog, the Pfizer vaccine has become the first in the world to complete all three phases of a clinical trial and receives approval from a government

This vaccine candidate relies on injecting snippets of a virus’s genetic material, in this case, messenger RNA (mRNA), into human cells. It spurs the production of viral proteins that mimic the coronavirus, training the immune system to recognise its presence. This vaccine requires two doses taken 21 days apart.

So far, only the U.K government has been reported to give full approval for the deployment of the Pfizer vaccine, while there is growing indication that the vaccine would soon receive emergency approval in the United States.

The British government said the initial doses of the vaccine will be available by next week for people over the age of 16, and that it would prioritise vaccinations for the most vulnerable populations, including nursing home residents, health-care workers, older adults, and those with underlying health conditions. For now, Pfizer and BioNTech have agreed to provide 40 million doses of the vaccine to the U.K. It will be delivered in stages throughout 2020 and 2021.

For Nigeria and indeed the rest of Africa, much hope is not in the offing with regard to when the full-scale vaccination will become a reality; especially when the pace of the wheel of governmental responsibility is put into context.

This is not to mention other peculiar challenges which stem from the fact that even after a vaccine is approved, it faces potential roadblocks when it comes to scaling up production and distribution, which also includes deciding which populations should get it first, and at what cost; all factors which could greatly impede the process of getting the vaccine across in this part of the world.

Beyond Pfizer and BioNTech, several other vaccines which have exhibited promising results appear to be underway. Belonging to this bracket is the understudy vaccine by The Wuhan Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm, which is projected to be delivered intramuscularly within a timeline of 0-21 days. There is also another promising option being developed by Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, developed under the platform of Non-Replicating Viral Vector, to be administered intramuscularly within a timeline of 0-56 days.

But, regardless of the ultimate arrival of the much anticipated COVID-19 vaccine, a fundamental hurdle is yet to be scaled.

According to reports, the vaccine’s complex and super-cold storage requirements are an obstacle for even the most sophisticated hospitals in the United States and may impact when and where it is available in rural areas or poor countries where resources are tight.

The main issue is that the vaccine, which is based on a novel technology that uses synthetic mRNA to activate the immune system against the virus, needs to be kept at minus 70 degrees Celsius (-94 F) or below.

“The cold chain is going to be one of the most challenging aspects of the delivery of this vaccination,” said Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“This will be a challenge in all settings because hospitals even in big cities do not have storage facilities for a vaccine at that ultra-low temperature.”

Indeed, one of the most prestigious U.S. hospitals, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, said it does not currently have that capability.

“We’re talking about a vaccine that needs storage at minus 70 or 80. That’s a tremendous logistical issue not only in the U.S. but outside the Western world,” said Dr Gregory Poland, a virologist and vaccine researcher with the Mayo Clinic.

“We’re a major medical centre and we don’t have storage capacity like this. That will be true for everybody. This is a logistical obstacle.”

Pfizer spokeswoman Kim Bencker said the company was working closely with the U.S. government and state officials on how to ship the vaccine from its distribution centres in the United States, Germany and Belgium around the globe.

Again, this presents a major problem for developing countries like Nigeria who are looking to procure the vaccines for mass distribution when it finally shows up on the market. With countries with highly sophisticated pharmaceutical facilities struggling to preserve the vaccine for optimum potency, there seem to be very bleak chances for third world countries with dilapidated facilities and further inadequacies of erratic power supply.