COVID-19 Vaccine Search in Laboratories World-Wide

"Typically, the first in-human study tends to be quite small, 40 or 50 people."
"Obviously the first human studies are done in young, healthy people, where they are the least likely to get into trouble if anything goes wrong, with any of the vaccines, including ours."
"We want to move forward in a very careful, deliberate way. But you have older people and people with respiratory and cardiac diseases who are dying at stunningly high rates when they get infected --we're talking 16, 25, 28 percent mortality."
"We have some pretty good ideas about why those vaccine-enhanced diseases occurred [with the previous use of RSV vaccines causing 'vaccine-enhanced disease'] and so we are quite specifically designing our vaccine to avoid that possibility."
Dr.Brian Ward, epidemiologist, professor, department of medicine, McGill University

"People are going to say you've got to be cautious. But other people will say, 'it seems to have worked in the study group -- we gotta go."
"I think we have to go somewhat faster, because the real answer to this plague is vaccination."
Arthur Caplan, bioethicist, Langone Health, New York University

"It's kind of pathetically funny that great vaccine work done by scientists with SARS and MER, both times the taps were shut off. It's hard to even get them into animal studies let alone clinical trials, because pretty well governments say, 'well, this disease is gone, why are we funding it'?"
"[It's different this time] It's amazing. I've never seen in my life, in my career, this much focus and this much effort being put toward so many vaccine candidates for one disease."
"It's fantastic. And I think some good will come out of this. But nothing like this can happen in a time frame that some governments would like to see happen."
"The public has to put a bit of faith and trust in us that nobody is trying to take short cuts where it is going to be more detrimental to the population than the disease itself."
"We're so much more advanced in ethics and understanding toxicity than we were back in the '40s that I think there's not a lot we need to worry about. We need to worry about all those that will succumb to this disease."
Dr.Eric Arts, Canada Research Chair in HIV pathogenesis and viral control, Western University

A COVID-19 assessment centre is set up outside of Scarborough Health Network – Birchmount Hospital on Saturday March 21, 2020. Veronica Henri/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

Professor Brian Ward is chief medical officer for Medicago Inc. based in Quebec, using plants with an aim to producing a vaccine for the global novel coronavirus pandemic streaming across the globe. This pathogen is of the same type as SARS, with some similarities and as-yet-unknown differences. It is not as deadly as SARS, but it infects at a higher rate and replicates wildly, searching for new hosts to enable it to continue replicating and infecting.

He explains the purpose of the coronavirus (crownvirus) "spikes" as proteins on the virus outer surface to clamp onto a human cell where it changes from its club appearance to a spear, fusing with the cell membrane's genetic material to enter the cell and replicate. The copies it makes go on to spread to other cells, and when copies are shed externally, the process continues when the virus infects other human hosts. A day following the free release of the genetic blueprint that Chinese scientists had placed on line for SARS-CoV-2, Medicago began its hunt for a vaccine.

In twenty days' time Medicago scientists produced a virus-like particle (VLP) mimicking the virus structure, stripped of harmful genetic material to make them non-infectious, but capable of 'tricking' the immune system into believing it has discovered a virus to generate enough antibodies primed to attack the real virus. Plans to begin testing the company's vaccine are set for July. Which seems a long way off, given the situation the world finds itself in.

Medicago

A galloping virus whose properties are still not completely understood, for which there is no cure, no treatment, no protocol to protect the public, no therapy of any use once it is transmitted, has now infected over a half million people worldwide, and produced close to 25,000 deaths. No one is spared, from the  young to the old, the wealthy and the poor, people of social substance and blue collar workers, people on welfare, and world leaders alike. The democratization of ill health.

This is the sudden presence of an entirely new virus, a pathogen of frightening properties, a zoonotic that transferred a virus that inhabits animals in an exchange between animal and human through a barbaric cuisine-cultural practise of using live wild animals in food preparation and pharmaceuticals. This is not a new situation, but one that has occurred previously and with increasing frequency, challenging nature to do her worst through human practises that offend nature itself.

Now research laboratories around the world are focused on discovering a way to stop this virus in its belligerently raging tracks, coming up with an anti-infectious agent capable of safely vaccinating hundreds of millions of people globally against the ongoing predation of a mysterious, debilitating, sometimes-deadly virus. Now, the need to adequately fund research to secure the health safety of the world's population has become a high priority of governments, which had prior to this denied the funding of ongoing vaccine research.

Moderna based in Massachusetts initiated their first human trials on a possible COVID-19 vaccine a week ago, hoping for initial results to arrive in possibly two months even though a commercially available vaccine will take at least 12 to 18 months. The possibility exists, however that a promising vaccine might be released on an emergency basis to inoculate health care workers at an earlier date.

Dr. Sonia Macieiewski samples proteins at Novavax labs in Rockville, Maryland on March 20, 2020, one of the labs developing a vaccine for the corona virus, COVID-19. ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images