Отправлено: 15.11.20 06:54. Заголовок: Covid: How close are we to a vaccine?

Hopes are rising that an effective vaccine against Covid-19 will be available within the next year.Preliminary findings show a vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech can prevent more than 90% of people from getting Covid-19. Meanwhile results from other advanced trials are expected soon.

Why do we need a vaccine?
If you want your life to get back to normal, then we need a vaccine.
Even now, the vast majority of people are still vulnerable to a coronavirus infection. It is only the restrictions on our lives that are preventing more people from dying.
But vaccines safely teach our bodies to fight the infection. This can either stop us catching coronavirus in the first place or at least make Covid less deadly.
The vaccine, alongside better treatments, is "the" exit strategy.

What drugs can help treat coronavirus?
Which vaccines look most likely to succeed?
Pfizer/BioNtech is the first pharmaceutical company to share data from the final stages of testing - known as a phase 3 trial.
This is a crucial point in vaccine development, where some experimental vaccines will fail.
About 43,000 people have been given the vaccine, and no safety concerns have been raised.

Who will get the vaccine first and when can you have it?
Trial results are also due in the next few weeks on a vaccine being developed by British drug manufacturer AstraZeneca and scientists at the University of Oxford.
Meanwhile encouraging data on a Russian vaccine called Sputnik V has also been released.
Based on interim results from a phase 3 trial, the same stage reached by the Pfizer jab, Russian researchers report that it is 92% efficient.

What other vaccines are being developed?
More results from other teams working on advanced trials are also expected in the coming weeks and months.
There are several other vaccines in the final stage of testing, including Moderna in the US, Wuhan Institute of Biological Products and Sinopharm in China, and Gamaleya Research Institute in Russia.
However, a trial in Brazil for a drug developed by the Chinese firm Sinovac has been suspended after what was described as a "severe adverse incident" - believed to be the death of a volunteer.

How different are the vaccines underdevelopment?
The point of a vaccine is to harmlessly expose parts of the virus to the immune system, which then recognises it as an invader and learns how to fight it.
There are many ways to do this and researchers are using different approaches.Pfizer/BioNtech (and Moderna) have developed what's known as an RNA vaccine. This uses an experimental approach, which involves injecting part of the virus's genetic code into the body, in order to train the immune system.
Once inside the body, this starts making viral proteins to train the body. This is a completely new technique.
The Oxford and Russian vaccines take a harmless virus that infects chimpanzees, and genetically modify it to resemble coronavirus, in the hope of getting a response.
Two of the big China-made vaccines use the original virus but in a disabled form, so it cannot cause an infection.

Understanding which method produces the best results will be vital. Challenge trials, in which people are deliberately infected, could help answer these questions.

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