Are COVID Vaccines Really Safe? How Scientists Developed a Safe Vaccine?

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Last weeks have seen the coronavirus vaccine dominate the news but you may have noticed that we've been a bit quiet on the topic so let's tackle the issue head-on all in one go more specifically though we're gonna discuss whether these vaccines are being produced so quickly by cutting corners or whether they're really safe for you to take? When creating a vaccine there are usually five stages which in combination ordinarily take over 10 years to complete now scientists have clearly speed up this process when it comes to covid leaving some to worry about the vaccine safety so let's run through the stages and see how vaccines are normally developed.
The first is the discovery stage this is where lab work takes place to discover how to produce an immune response to a particular disease, then comes the pre-clinical phase which ordinarily includes animal testing then clinical developments which have three phases including human testing then regulatory review which contains all the necessary paperwork and clearance for a vaccine and finally the manufacturing stage so you may be wondering exactly how the development process has been adapted to make it much quicker while also trying to maintain scientific rigour. 


THE DISCOVERY STAGE

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Firstly the discovery stage was sped up quite significantly made possible by the fact that the virus's genome was sequenced incredibly quickly by the Shanghai Public Health Clinical centre as well as the fact that there are so many people working on research around the world all at once when it came to actually develop the vaccine though money was one of the key things that sped all of this up. The welcome trusts claim that the average vaccine costs between 200 million and 500 million dollars to develop however due to the speed at which the coronavirus vaccine is being developed they estimate that it could cost in excess of 3 billion. Now, this is clearly a huge amount of money and when developing other vaccines companies wouldn't be able to spend this amount for fear that it could lose them a ton of cash, however, when it came to covid profitability simply wasn't an issue with economy shut down and people suffering from lockdowns governments were willing to pour basically unlimited money into vaccine development. the extra money essentially allowed them to speed things up ordinarily.



PRE-CLINICAL STAGE

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One step is completed and passed before moving on to the next that's because if they ran steps simultaneously they could discover an issue in an earlier stage only to have wasted a bunch of time and money further through the process with basically infinite money and resources the whole thing can be run pretty much simultaneously, something which would otherwise be supremely risky and completely unprofitable



CLINICAL TESTING

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When it comes to testing the vaccine this stage has been sped up too, thanks to multiple concurrent tests happening all across the world which means that this stage hasn't been skipped and the same number of participants have still been included just doing it more rapidly. In fact, researchers at the university of oxford included 24 000 people in phase three of its clinical trials and none of them was hospitalized or had any serious covert cases as a result of being given the vaccine. Similarly, the Pfizer biotech vaccine has completed its phase 3 trials, they included 43,000 people in this stage and the only serious side effects were fatigue and headaches which occurred in 3.8 and 2 per cent of the people respectively. So as you can see the side effects are minor and only occur really so while the testing process has happened quicker than it normally would that's just because more tests were conducted concurrently rather than a reduction in the volume or thoroughness of testing.


REGULATORY STAGE

Now, this is where the major news has come this week it's been announced that with trials completed the regulator in the UK has officially approved the Pfizer vaccine this makes the UK government the first in the world to approve it, this is obviously big news and kickstarted some major patriotism but there is a serious question which needs to be tackled as it's been approved very quickly in the UK does that mean that the UK's vaccine regulatory process is less rigorous than in other countries, well not really the reason this has been approved at speed is down to something called a rolling review, this is where regulators run multiple stages of the review at the same time to speed the process up using a very similar process to the one we explained earlier for vaccine development. 


CONCLUSION

Now let's move on to the question of whether you should get the vaccine when it's publicly available to you? Well as with all vaccines being vaccinated yourself doesn't just help you it helps others and the community around you as the World Health Organization says "some people like those who are seriously ill are advised not to get certain vaccines so, they depend on the rest of us to get vaccinated to help reduce the spread of the disease". So if there's some reason you can't get the coronavirus vaccine you're gonna have to rely on other people getting the vaccine, but a huge proportion of people need to get vaccinated before this herd immunity kicks in. The WHO points out that 95 percent of people need to be immunized for measles to stop it from spreading and the same is true here, the more people who are vaccinated the harder it is for the virus to jump from person to person thus, slowing spread and protecting those who can't get vaccinated themselves. Scientists are currently estimating that between 60 and 70 per cent of people will need to get immunized for covid to stop a significant spread and the best chance for this herd immunity to be built up is for everyone who's able to get a vaccine.




AbhishekRawat
ContentWriter
@DayLightMedia