Bill Gates - Making a Vaccine

To clear a point from my post yesterday - 'Oxygen Saves' - I do believe in alternative medicine, but also that there is a place for both orthodox & alternative.

I was brought up to (1) Keep healthy through the right diet & exercise, and keep mind and body active.( 2)Treat ailments yourself with 'honey, mud and maggots' country remedies, if possible.(3) Use doctors & hospitals as a last resort.

I know not everyone's health & circumstances allow them to do that, but think that the reason the hospital A & Es get swamped is because too many use them as a first resort.
The pendulum has swung too far.

 Here is a very full & interesting article on developing a corona-19 vaccine from Bill Gates.

This is a summarised version, but I have put a link to the article in full with video, at the end of this post.

Article starts -

Humankind has never had a more urgent task than creating broad immunity for coronavirus. Realistically, if we’re going to return to normal, we need to develop a safe, effective vaccine—and we need to do it faster than we’ve ever developed a vaccine before.

Creating a new vaccine usually takes a minimum of five years.

But I’m optimistic that we can safely condense that process into 18 months or even less.

How exactly are we going to do that? The process is complicated but fascinating. I noticed that many of you are particularly interested in the details of how we’re going to make this vaccine and get it out to the world, so I wrote an in-depth explainer that will hopefully answer some of your questions.

To get back to how we were, we have to (1)find an almost perfect drug to treat COVID-19, or (2) when almost every person on the planet has been vaccinated against coronavirus.

The former is unlikely to happen anytime soon. We’d need a miracle treatment that was at least 95 percent effective to stop the outbreak.

Most of the drug candidates right now are nowhere near that powerful. Which leaves us with a vaccine.

The world is creating this vaccine on a historically fast timeline.

Safety and efficacy are the two most important goals for every vaccine. Safety is exactly what it sounds like: is the vaccine safe to give to people? Some minor side effects (like a mild fever or injection site pain) can be acceptable, but you don’t want to inoculate people with something that makes them sick.

Efficacy measures how well the vaccine protects you from getting sick. Although you’d ideally want a vaccine to have 100 percent efficacy, many don’t. 

For example, this year’s flu vaccine is around 45 percent effective.

To test for safety and efficacy, every vaccine goes through three phases of trials: After the vaccine passes all three trial phases, you start building the factories to manufacture it, and it gets submitted to the WHO and various government agencies for approval.

This process works well for most vaccines, but the normal development timeline isn’t good enough right now. Every day we can cut from this process will make a huge difference to the world in terms of saving lives and reducing trillions of dollars in economic damage.

For COVID-19, financing development is not an issue. Governments and other organizations (including our foundation (Bill & Melinda Gates)and an amazing alliance called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) have made it clear they will support whatever it takes to find a vaccine.

The most promising candidates take a variety of approaches to protecting the body against COVID-19. To understand what exactly that means, it’s helpful to remember how the human immune system works.

When a disease pathogen (virus) gets into your system, your immune system responds by producing antibodies. These antibodies attach themselves to substances called antigens on the surface of the invading microbe, which sends a signal to your body to attack.

Your immune system keeps a record of every microbe it has ever defeated, so that it can quickly recognize and destroy invaders before they make you ill.

Vaccines circumvent this whole process by teaching your body how to defeat a pathogen without ever getting sick. 

The two most common types—and the ones you’re probably most familiar with—are inactivated and live vaccines. 

Inactivated vaccines contain pathogens that have been killed.

Live vaccines, on the other hand, are made of living pathogens that have been weakened (or “attenuated”). 

They’re highly effective but more prone to side effects than their inactivated counterparts.

Inactivated and live vaccines are what we consider “traditional” approaches. There are a number of COVID-19 vaccine candidates of both types, and for good reason: they’re well-established.

We know how to test and manufacture them. The downside is that they’re time-consuming to make. There’s a ton of material in each dose of a vaccine. 

Most of that material is biological, which means you have to grow it. That takes time, unfortunately.

That’s why I’m particularly excited by two new approaches that some of the candidates are taking: RNA and DNA vaccines.

If one of these new approaches pans out, we’ll likely be able to get vaccines out to the whole world much faster. (For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to explain RNA vaccines. DNA vaccines are similar, just with a different type of genetic material and method of administration.)

Our foundation—both through our own funding and through CEPI—has been supporting the development of an RNA vaccine platform for nearly a decade.

We were planning to use it to make vaccines for diseases that affect the poor like malaria, but now it’s looking like one of the most promising options for COVID.

Summarised article goes on.To read the Bill Gates post  in full & see video click below

  Click here for the article in full with graphics.

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