Vaccinology: This involves figuring out what types of vaccines are capable of delivering the kind of protection our immune systems will need, as well as developing effective strategies to test vaccine candidates. One thing scientists are keen to understand is how pre-existing immunity to one or more coronaviruses affects the way the immune system reacts when it encounters a brand-new member of the viral family. Immunology: This means learning more about how different parts of the human immune system respond to coronaviruses - and once their protections kick in, how long they last. Then they’ll need to figure out which ones are most threatening and how many will need to be factored into a vaccine design to ensure it is broadly effective. Virology: In order to create a pan-coronavirus vaccine, scientists will need to get a better handle on all of the coronaviruses that are out there, and what they’re doing. The experts who worked on the road map for nearly a year organized their epic to-do list around five topic areas: And to top it all off, the protection afforded by this dream vaccine would last for years, perhaps even a lifetime.
In doing so, it would preclude any upstart coronavirus from spreading among humans. It wouldn’t just keep people alive and out of hospitals, it would make sure they didn’t become sick in the first place. The ideal vaccine would be capable of neutralizing any kind of coronavirus that comes our way. The single most useful tool to thwart that scenario is a vaccine. Considering that there are thousands of coronaviruses circulating in animals - bat species alone are thought to harbor more than 3,200 distinct coronaviruses - it’s a pretty safe bet that at least one will try to cross the species barrier in the foreseeable future. In the first two cases, and almost certainly the third, the coronavirus culprit jumped from an animal to a human. The most recent, of course, is COVID-19, whose global death toll now exceeds 6.8 million. Then there was Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, which emerged in Saudi Arabia in 2012 and was responsible for at least 858 deaths. First there was the 2003 epidemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, which killed 774 people, mostly in China and Hong Kong.
0 kommentar(er)
