COVID-19 Chapter 5: Vaccines

Chapter 5 of our Anatomy of a Pandemic series covering all things COVID-19 goes through some of the exciting developments in potential vaccines for this new virus. Starting us off is an anonymous account describing the challenges faced by someone in the US trying to get tested for COVID-19. Then we review some of the basics of vaccines - how they work, the different kinds, and some of the challenges in accelerating the vaccine development pipeline during a crisis such as this. We sought the expert knowledge of Dr. M. Elena Bottazzi (interview recorded March 17, 2020), who is part of a group that is currently working on developing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. She answers a number of your vaccine- and treatment-related questions and sheds some light on the prospects of vaccine development for this particular disease. We wrap up again by going through the top five things we learned from our expert. To help you get a better idea of the topics covered in this episode, we have listed the questions below: What makes this virus a good candidate for a vaccine? (11:05) Why is it more difficult these days to produce completely protective vaccines vs partially protective vaccines? (13:29) How is the vaccine that your group is working on made, what is its target and how does it work? (16:02) What is the timeline of vaccine development, testing, deployment, and how soon might we see an effective vaccine for SARS-CoV-2? (21:19) What steps of this development process can be shortened to get an 'early release' of a vaccine? (25:49) It seems we are better at developing vaccines than we are antivirals; why is this? (28:55)