GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Some trials are currently on hold, but a number of promising potential vaccines for COVID-19 are seeing significant progress.
While the country is working to fast-track a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, it will take time to ensure anything approved is actually safe and ready to be distributed.
“There’s promising vaccines that we saw some very initial studies on. So that’s great!” said Prevea Health CEO Dr. Ashok Rai. “So now we’re in that phase 3, the real clinical trial, to make sure they’re safe and that they work…They’re still enrolling people in there, and it takes awhile to get the results from that. We do expect results sometime this winter, whether it’s November, December, January – it’s hard to predict that.”
Some people are trying to accelerate the predictions for when the vaccine could arrive, but even manufacturers have reported that nothing will be released until there is a safe and ready option.
“Safe and ready really means getting those studies done. Getting a really good clinical trial where half the people got the vaccine, half didn’t, and we compared who got immune and who didn’t and what side effects might be there,” Rai explained. “I think we still have another month or two before we even get a chance to review those trials, and then make decisions as a country if this is the safe and right thing to do.”
There are currently two most talked about vaccinations, and Rai says the methodology behind how they are developed is different from how vaccines have been created over the past 50-100 years.
“When the first vaccines came out, you were basically taking that actual virus and giving it to somebody and making sure the virus was, for lack of better words, kind of dead – and getting your body to develop and immune response to it,” Rai told WTAQ News. “We’re seeing in these modern vaccinations, like what’s being designed with Sars-CoV-2, is taking a targeted piece of genetic material and getting your body to react to that…Which means that’s a lot faster for them to be able to make that type of vaccine than we have in the past.”
That speed could mean easier mass production, which in turn could provide more supplies faster and more efficiently than ever. But even with those kinds of production capabilities (once given the go-ahead), there is an important process and line-up of who will receive their immunizations first.
“Once it’s a go, I think the production lines will be going. And actually, some already have started,” Rai said. “But then you have to get into the infrastructure of getting people in. Getting the right people in first – such as healthcare workers, those in nursing homes, those in congregate settings – and then eventually getting it to everybody that we can get it to.”
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