By: Stephanie Di Vito
Neuroscience Graduate Student
Imagine your body as an amazing castle; every castle has guards to protect what’s inside. That’s the job of your immune system: protecting against harmful attacks from organisms like viruses. The guards, our immune system, recognize harmful organisms and mount an attack. Immune cells eat the virus and spit out small pieces of it to other immune cells. This warns of the intruder, generates more immune cells, and specifies their attack. Looking back on 2020, we can see this isn’t a perfect system; sometimes our immune system needs extra help, either with medicine or a vaccine. What if those castle guards had the help of a secret messenger? One that warned them of the type of attack coming so they could better prepare for it? That’s how a vaccine works in our body.
Vaccines warn our immune system of a virus we may come into contact with, and prepare it to attack and clear it. A small piece of the virus activates the immune system to protect the body from the virus. The main benefit is the creation of memory cells. Some immune cells specific to that virus remain in your body and continue to survey it in case that organism decides to come back. If you were exposed a second time to the virus your immune response would be quicker and stronger. Pretty cool, right?
Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the WHO in March of 2020, and has infected over 100 million people worldwide and killed 2.5 million as of March 5th 2021. For the past year, many have been working tirelessly to create a vaccine to provide hope in this time of isolation and global insecurity. With three vaccines approved in Canada from Moderna, BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson, some people have naturally had questions about the vaccine.
Q. We’ve never had a Coronavirus vaccine before, how did we make this one?
In 2003, there was an outbreak of another virus part of the Coronavirus family like Covid-19, SARS. A vaccine was attempted but never realized. The RNA technology in the approved vaccines has been researched for almost 15 years! We have also made amazing advances in our ability to quickly sequence the genetic code of the virus. These advances in vaccine technology greatly sped up the process to create a viable vaccine on a short timeline. We’ve written an article with more detail about the technology of RNA vaccines used for Covid-19 click here!
Q. Isn’t a year too short of a timeline to create a vaccine?
Many are thinking “This has never happened before, we’ve never seen a vaccine for a new virus created in a year!” There is another vaccine that is developed every year that may be overlooked, the annual flu vaccine. The flu strains that circulate change on a regular basis. Every February, the World Health Organization (WHO) selects 3 strain targets that will be in the vaccine for the following Fall and Winter seasons. They distribute these strains to manufacturers who create the vaccines and run clinical trials, and demonstrate their safety and effectiveness. There are approved vaccines for the flu each year, targeting different strains most likely in circulation. It’s not unheard of for a vaccine to be created in a year, especially when provided with enough information and the technology to attack the virus in a new way.
Q. Was the vaccine rushed, potentially compromising safety?
With the widespread effects of Covid-19, a sense of urgency for the vaccine was felt. Normally, funding is a major barrier of the development process. Testing multiple candidates and running clinical trials is increasingly expensive and takes years to accomplish due to funding concerns. Due to an increase in interest for a vaccine, billions of dollars were circulated around the world in the efforts to develop a vaccine. Increases in funding allowed manufacturers to run different phases and dosage trials at the same time. Manufacturers also took risks by producing the vaccine in large amounts prior to its approval, demonstrating their confidence in their technology. Some may be concerned that safety wasn’t taken into consideration. However, with the Covid-19 vaccines this is not true. The development and review of the vaccine was completed in a parallel process. Health Canada allowed manufacturers to submit results as they came in. This allowed manufacturers to move onto further stages without having to wait for approval at each stage. It’s very likely that the Covid-19 vaccine was given priority over other trials or drugs as well during the review and approval process.
Q. Are there long-term effects from taking this vaccine?
It still may seem like it’s “too soon” for a vaccine, and many individuals have been concerned about long-term effects from receiving the vaccine. All the trials were fully completed and vaccines were distributed to thousands of people with high rates of effectiveness in trials before approval in Canada. As mentioned earlier, these vaccines only contain a small part of the virus to activate the immune system. The activation usually only lasts a few weeks, enough for your body to develop the memory cells against the virus. This is the same for all of the vaccines currently available which haven’t had any negative long-term consequences. The only exception to this is the Chickenpox vaccine which may cause shingles years after receipt. This is ONLY true for vaccines that have a live but weakened form of the virus, which is not what’s inside the Covid-19 vaccines. The immune system would recognize the foreign piece of the virus; the process of mounting an immune response and creating memory cells would clear any virus pieces from the vaccine. It would be difficult to associate a vaccine with a long-term consequence as the components of the original vaccine wouldn’t be present in the body anymore.
Q.What about infertility issues?!
This is a scary one to think about, but let’s break it down. There are claims that the Covid-19 spike protein in the vaccine and another protein, syncytin-1, that is integral to development during pregnancy are too similar. If the body attacked this protein when someone was pregnant it may cause termination and infertility issues. The claims were made by a former employee of Pfizer, who hadn’t been working on the Covid-19 vaccine themselves. Many in the scientific community have noted that the protein sequences are quite different from each other. Our bodies are effective at identifying different proteins from one another, so it’s unlikely that the vaccine would cause infertility. Many are arguing that clinical trials should include pregnant and breastfeeding women; Health Canada has advised consultation with a healthcare provider about receiving the vaccine and weighing their personal risks.
2020 was a scary year. A pandemic shook the world and changed most of our lives. We shifted to working and staying at home, wearing masks when we went out and receiving information that kept changing. If you have questions about the vaccine, like many, there are credible sources with more detailed information discussing the contents, the trials, and the approval process. Talking to a healthcare provider may also help with answering further questions and calming concerns. Due to the global cooperation and collaboration, we were able to create an effective vaccine and start distributing it to at-risk populations. This is an incredible feat for science as a whole and it provides hope that things will soon return to normal.
Sources:
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2007/hc-sc/H164-47-2007E.pdf
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-approval-process-explainer-1.5827161
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/events-as-they-happen