Covid-19 Vaccines: What You Might Want to Know

With a COVID-19 vaccine on the horizon, there are many things that need to be considered. This article will be reviewing the different phases in vaccine development, Canada’s progress in terms of distributing vaccines and two of the leading vaccines: Pfizer and Moderna.

First, however, how are vaccines made? There are five steps to vaccine development, them being:pre-clinical evaluation, phase 1, phase 2, phase 3, and finally, approval.

Pre-clinical evaluation is the determination of the ability of the prototype product. To put it in simpler terms, it means assessing whether the vaccine’s prototype will be able to function as an effective vaccine. For example, in creating prototypes for cars, the “preclinical” evaluation would be looking at the original car designs and assessing whether they would work as an actual car.

In phase 1, the vaccine is given to a small sample of people. This phase determines the properties of a vaccine, tolerability, and pharmacological parameters. This means that they will test whether a human can tolerate the vaccine, what the vaccine is made of, and whether the vaccine can be distributed to people around the world. Phase 2 includes a larger group of people and is usually used to determine the ability of a vaccine in terms of immunogenicity (the ability to trigger an immune response). Phase 3 is where vaccine makers are finally getting ready to release the vaccine, checking data from phase 2 and preparing for distribution. This is also when the efficacy rate of the vaccine (the percentage of the vaccine success rate) is calculated. Approval is the last step when a vaccine is approved by the governing health body of the country it is being deployed to. In the USA, for example, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in America has to approve a vaccine before it can be released to the public.

The Moderna vaccine works similarly to the Pfizer vaccine. It uses RNA technology with a 94.5% efficacy rate. This vaccine can be stored at -20 celsius in regular freezers, making it more practical to distribute and administer then the Pfizer vaccine.

Both of these vaccine candidates require two doses, each shot 28 days apart. Half of the vaccine is used in the first shot while the other half is used in the second shot. This is so that the body is not overloaded with too many dead viruses.

These vaccines might not be a silver bullet, but they are certainly a welcomed light at the end of the dark COVID-19 tunnel.