About a year after the discovery of the Corona virus, it was officially announced that a vaccine had been reached for this devastating epidemic after Britain officially approved the Pfizer-Biontech vaccine, in an unprecedented achievement in the history of science, so who is credited with the speedy access to the Corona vaccine?
In the early afternoon of January 3, 2020, a small metal box was delivered to the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center addressed to the virologist Professor Zhang Yongchen.
Inside, swabs from a patient who had a fatal, fictional respiratory disease on occasion was sweeping through Wuhan, packed in dry ice for safekeeping.
What exactly caused the horrific increases in case numbers? Do medical authorities want to know? How did the disease spread?
This Chinese scientist was the reason for the speedy access to the Corona vaccine, according to a report by the British newspaper The Guardian .
Zhang and his colleagues got to work within the next 48 hours, and almost without stopping, he and his team used advanced sequencing machines to detect the RNA - the genetic building blocks - of the virus they believed was responsible for the outbreak.
Deciphering the 28,000 letters of this RNA - which functions as letters of DNA in a human - will give an accurate indication of the nature and behavior of the new pathogen.
In the early hours of January 5, 2020, Zhang and his team completed their mission.
They discovered that the virus was a previously unknown virus and was closely related to the virus that caused the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in China several years ago. And like SARS, the new virus is clearly spread from person to person. "It was definitely very dangerous," said Zhang.
The breakthrough made by Professor Zhang Yong Chen, by publishing the genome of SARS-CoV-2 in January, gave science an opportunity to respond.
But Zhang was not alone in favor of the quick arrival of the Corona vaccine.
How did Zhang's discovery lead to the speedy arrival of the Corona vaccine?
Within days of his serial breakthrough, Zhang's findings were published on virological.org - giving the world the first clue of the pathogens that have since killed more than 1.5 million people and leading to closures, travel restrictions and economic disruption.
Yet Zhang's discovery had more than just a harbinger of chaos and death.
His team's early dismantling of the structure of the virus responsible for Covid-19 - as the disease was later called - gave science an opportunity to respond.
The result was an international effort this week that will see a vaccine for the disease be given to the public for the first time.
It is an extraordinary achievement. The transition from discovering a deadly new virus to producing a tested vaccine that can prevent its effects in less than a year is unprecedented in scientific history.
For some, it's a medical miracle.
As Stephen Griffin of the University of Leeds School of Medicine said: “The amazing progress in developing a vaccine through its use in humans definitely sets a new standard for what can be achieved when applying adequate resources and scientific focus on global health.”
How was the vaccine reached?
The Covid-19 virus, known as Sars-CoV-2, is a thorny ball of genetic material coated in a fatty chemical called lipid and is 80 parts per billionth of a meter in diameter.
These protrusions consist of a protein that attaches to the receptors on the surface of cells in our bodies and then slides the virus's RNA into them. Once inside, this same RNA enters the replication mechanism of our cells and makes multiple copies of the virus. These cells burst and the infection spreads.
By sequencing the genome of the virus, Zhang provided vital information that has allowed scientists since then to isolate and replicate individual pieces of the virus and use these components to produce vaccines.
Professor Adam Finn of the University of Bristol in Britain said, "What Zhang did was very crucial for what followed." "Without the information he provided, no one could have started working on vaccines."
Why has the prickly protein become the focus of research?
The prickly protein that plays a major role in permitting has become
For Sars-CoV-2 to rapidly replicate the focus of most vaccine makers.
The researchers concluded that if a person could be helped to form a robust immune response that would prevent the barbed proteins from slipping into our cells, the progression of the virus would be halted.
To do this, they needed to find ways to put chunks of spike protein into the body in order to stimulate antibody formation, a method that has since been adopted by most Covid-19 vaccine projects, even though it has different ways to implement it.
"The crucial point is that you don't need an actual virus on your hand these days, you only need 28,000 letters of its genetic code," said coronavirus expert David Matthews from the University of Bristol.
How did the two Turkish scientists succeed in reaching the vaccine before anyone?
One group settled in Frankfurt, where two Turkish scientists, Ozlem Torresi and her husband, Ugur Sahin, founded BioNTech in 2008 to manufacture RNA vaccines designed to fight cancer, an expertise that could be quickly transferred to the battle against Covid-19.
They realized that using genetic sequences provided by Zhang, BioNTech - backed by the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer - was able to assemble fragments of the RNA code for elevated virus proteins and inject them into humans. It is picked up by cells in our body.
RNA droplets guide our cells' replication machines to make spiky protein molecules. When detected by our immune system, this triggers the production of antibodies.
A similar approach has been adopted by the US biotechnology company Moderna in making its vaccine.
"It's a new technology, but it's also very simple," said Professor Peter Openshaw of Imperial College London. "It basically involves basic chemical synthesis and not much more. You don't have to carefully take care of tissue cultures, keep vessels highly sterile etc. You just make a chemical strand from RNA and put it in a person. This is the main reason why BioNTech and Moderna got them ... Such quick results. "
It is also a very promising technology that could be tapped very quickly in the future, Openshaw added. “It's almost like a plug and play vaccine.
You can choose other parts of RNA and create compound vaccines with incredible ease. For example, you can combine RNA for influenza
And Covid RNA and a combination vaccine work against both diseases. This technology is revolutionary. "
Oxford vaccine is a different approach
Scientists have taken a different approach led by Professor Sarah Gilbert of the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, UK.
After the Ebola outbreak in 2014-2016, researchers there were preparing plans to create a vaccine for any new emerging disease that might infect the world - and in the shortest possible time.
To do this, they designed a common cold virus that infects chimpanzees so that it does not infect humans, but that it can also be modified to carry the genetic blueprints to cut the virus that it wants to train the human immune system to attack.
Armed with this technology, the Oxford scientists - later backed by the pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca - had to insert the genetic instructions for the spike protein into their engineered virus and begin testing.
But do vaccines provide lasting immunity?
"Receiving this news less than a year after the emergence of Covid-19 is an impressive achievement and testament to the extraordinary global research response," said Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust. "Effective vaccines will change the basics of this epidemic."
Moderna, BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca were the first to pass the trials, but there are 200 tests around the world. The question was: Will any of it work? For several months, the international community watched and waited for clinical pathways to advance in the hope that a vaccine could be produced at least 50% effective in preventing Covid-19.
If we want to have a future without Covid, we need something that really prevents transmission of the virus. If not, the virus will spread non-stop and anyone who has not been vaccinated will always be in danger, we just need to save lives. But in the long run this will be a problem.
However, there was an encouraging indication of the Oxford-AstraZeneca during the trials.
Participants were routinely tested to see if those who received the vaccine had fewer viral loads in their throat and noses than those who got the placebo.
Early signs indicated that they had fewer payloads and thus may be less likely to transmit the virus.
However, other problems will take longer to be resolved.
It is unclear how long the vaccine protection against Covid-19 will last.
Some reports indicated that antibody levels begin to drop significantly only a few months after a person is infected
With Covid-19, which indicates that levels of the antibody caused by the vaccine may fade rapidly as well.
“From analyzes of Moderna and other vaccines, it is clear that vaccines induce much stronger immune responses, at least in terms of antibody production - than is caused by the natural infection of the virus.
So the levels of antibodies produced by vaccines should be fairly long lasting. "
It was an extraordinary journey and a huge achievement although the scientists are clear that there will be obstacles in the way.
Adverse reactions to the vaccine will affect some individuals while global supply chains are disrupted. The crucial point is that we now have vaccines to treat Covid-19 and it looks like they will work. It is a start.