A COVID-19 vaccine isn’t the only tool for fighting this pandemic. An immunologist argues that safe pneumonia vaccines would reduce the severity of COVID-19, save lives and prevent the worst cases.
Experts from across The Conversation look at how COVID-19 vaccines will work, how they’re being tested and manufactured, and what challenges there will be to rolling them out.
The COVID-19 new normal might be here for quite some time.
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As ready as you are to be done with COVID-19, it’s not going anywhere soon. A historian of disease describes how once a pathogen emerges, it’s usually here to stay.
Our immune cells become less able to fight off infections as we get older.
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Vaccines work by teaching your immune system about new viruses. Your immune cells are very clever – they will remember what they learnt, and protect you if you encounter that virus in the future.
There are many scientific and ethical challenges ahead. But these types of trials have helped in the development of vaccines against a few diseases. Could they do the same for COVID-19?
Samples from volunteers are handled in the laboratory at Imperial College in London, on July 30, 2020. Imperial College is working on the development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
(AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)
With lives depending on a vaccine, trust in Canada’s COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force is crucial. Members of the task force need to make any industry links or potential conflicts of interest publicly clear.
A worker inspects vials of a SARS CoV-2 vaccine for COVID-19 produced by SinoVac at its factory in Beijing on Sept. 24, 2020.
(AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
Our first exposure to a pathogen, either naturally or via vaccination, can affect how our immune system responds in the future to the same or similar pathogens.
From 2017 to 2019, Twitter users in the United States saw many tweets related to vaccination but only rarely encountered anti-vaccine content and almost never saw content from bots.
An 1801 etching of a dandified physician taking a lancet to a ‘dindonnade,’ a word signifying both ‘turkey’ and ‘hoax.’ It ridicules the smallpox vaccine, which takes fluid from an animal to insert into a human.
(Wellcome Collection)
The history of anti-vaccination theories can help us understand how such claims capture a popular following. The same misinformation used against 19th century smallpox vaccine is still in use today.
Dean Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor of Vaccinology at University of the Witwatersrand; and Director of the SAMRC Vaccines and Infectious Diseases Analytics Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand