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As authorities struggle to respond
to the COVID-19 viral pandemic,
everyday life has drastically altered.
By travel restrictions, school closures,
and diminished business and social interactions.
It is the most extensive lockdown
the world has ever seen.
But even as much of our world
appears on the verge of completely shutting down,
some among us jump into action.
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From the outset of the outbreak,
the scientific community quickly geared-up
for an urgent battle.
Each pathogen has its own path
that it takes in that context.
And this one has surprised many of us
in terms of the speed with which it spread
through the Chinese population and then, subsequently,
the speed with which it has
impacted other countries more globally.
This is a disease that is completely new
so we don't know really a lot.
Every day that goes by we learn more.
At the same time, this is a very fast moving target.
And so, the more data we have, the better it is.
And that knowledge
forms the backbone of a critical quest
to develop a vaccine to help defeat COVID-19.
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The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations,
or CEPI, supports vaccine research around the world.
But the transition from theoretical endeavors
to real-world needs happened more quickly
than anyone anticipated or hoped for.
This is the most frightening disease
I've ever encountered in my career,
and that includes Ebola,
it includes MERS, it includes SARS.
And it's frightening
because of the combination of infectiousness
and a lethality that appears to be manyfold higher than flu.
But despite the urgency
of the COVID-19 pandemic,
epidemiologists and government health officials
must face a harsh reality.
Vaccine development and testing takes time,
at least 12 to 18 months.
The vaccine is quite down the road at this point.
And now, there are a lot of programs
are starting worldwide to find those weapons
to defy the disease.
We'd be giving this
to normal people to prevent infection.
So you must be sure.
The edict of medicine,
first, do no harm.
So, we need to make sure it's safe,
and we need to make sure it works.
That entire process will take at least a year
and a year-and-a-half.
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Professor Paul Young
leads one of the most promising
research operations at the moment
with his team at Australia's University of Queensland.
Thanks, in part, to a CEPI-funded slight headstart.
For the past six years,
they focus their work on broad-based vaccine modeling,
using mRNA coding, an adaptable methodology
able to quickly respond to new viruses as they emerge.
So we've developed a generic platform technology
for vaccine production
that could be applicable to a wide range of viruses.
And that's why we've been able to apply it
to this previously unknown virus, relatively rapidly.
Amid the initial escalation
of the public health emergency
in the city of Wuhan,
the Chinese released the genetic sequencing
of this new Coronavirus, COVID-19,
on January 10th of 2020.
And as soon as that was done,
we began work on developing our vaccine approach to it.
We made more than 200 different versions
before we settled on one particular vaccine candidate.
And that has already gone into animal studies
to prove that we actually induce an immune response
that is likely to protect animals.
Once we've done that
and we've also gone through toxicity studies,
then we'll hopefully be ready to enter clinical trials,
human clinical trials, in late June.
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COVID-19's spike like structures
exhibit a specific protein to gain entry into its host cells
in order to replicate.
One of the prime immune responses, an antibody response,
that targets that particular protein
on the surface of the virus.
And that can generate a neutralizing activity,
or a killing activity that destroys the virus.
Young's line of attack
aims to unleash the body's defenses
by introducing this protein.
Stabilized, or clamped in position,
as it would appear on the virus's surface.
So that when we vaccinate individuals,
their immune response sees this protein
as though it was the virus itself.
And they will mount an immune response
that can then become their memory response
if they subsequently encounter the live virus.
So, we're trying to mimic the outer exterior of the virus
by generating this particular protein
as the vaccine immunogen.
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Disease pandemics litter human history.
But vaccination technology
is a relatively recent tool in our medical arsenal.
One that arose kind of by accident.
A response to smallpox in the 18th century,
thanks to the discriminating eye
of Dr. Edward Jenner and others.
People used to say
find a milkmaid, she'll be the most beautiful girl in town.
Jenner deduced the women's work
impacted their appearance.
In putting two and two together,
the reason they never got smallpox
is because by milking their cows,
they got blisters on their hands, which we call cowpox.
And getting blisters on their hands
prevented them, immunized them, we would now say,
from getting smallpox.
So he created the first vaccine.
A thread soaked in a concoction of cowpox material
and exposed it to patients
by cutting a small slit in their arm.
And it wasn't 'til almost a hundred years later
that we began to understand
that there was such a thing as an infectious disease
and that the reason
people didn't get most infectious diseases twice
is because they were immunized.
As scientific understanding grew,
so too did the use of vaccines to do battle
against some of our most feared diseases like polio.
The parents of 440,000 grammar school children
in 44 states gave their permission
for injections of the preventive series of three Salk shots.
The first three children inoculated
were Dr. Salk's own sons.
But thousands of others across the country
soon joined them
for the largest field test in medical history.
To this day,
smallpox is the only eradicated human disease.
But thanks to global vaccination efforts,
polio remains only in small pockets.
Still dangerous, but held largely at bay.
I joined this hospital in 1990.
So 20 years back,
there were 3,000 new cases of paralytic poliomyelitis
in the city of Delhi alone.
Today, we have none in Delhi and in the last year,
I think we've had none in the country.
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Vaccines are very important for producing,
what we call, herd immunity.
And herd immunity is really
the ways in which we can offset
the risk of large spread of disease
by immunizing a large portion of the community from it.
Which means it's much harder for it to spread.
And that's helped control
many childhood diseases like measles, mumps, and rubella.
And although a lot of people think measles is not so bad,
I had it when I was six-years-old
and it seemed pretty bad at the time.
But nowadays, we have a vaccine for it
and people don't remember that
there have been many documented epidemics
in which measles killed 30% of the people it infected.
You know, after the eradication of smallpox
and as polio eradication efforts
really became more successful,
in the mid-to-late 20th century
there was a feeling that perhaps the human race
had gotten infectious diseases licked
and they were on the retreat.
And perhaps, we could conceive of an era
or a time when infectious disease was not necessarily
a global health threat.
But by the 1970s and 80s,
previously unknown diseases emerged,
like Ebola and HIV/AIDS.
So diseases like these were utterly new to science
and figuring out ways to respond to
what we now see
as newer, novel pathogens
has become the battle of the 21st century.
Enter the most
recent coronaviruses: SARS, MERS,
and now, COVID-19.
A global pandemic
which demands a collaborative global response.
I think this is the moment to think
open data and open science.
That would really make a difference.
One thing that a major epidemic does
is it galvanizes a lot of attention, a lot of funding,
a lot of focus on these diseases themselves.
There are multiple vaccine approaches going forward,
including our own.
And we're all of the belief
that we're not racing each other.
This is a race against the virus
and whoever gets there first in terms of a viable vaccine,
we can all cheer for that.
Indeed, CEPI supports several research teams
engaged in the Coronavirus fight,
including the NIH Vaccine Program
that went forward with the first human trials
on March 16th in Seattle,
one of America's first COVID-19 hotspots.
It was easy.
It was just like a flu shot.
I hope that we get to a working vaccine quickly
and that we can save lives.
Still, Australian Virologist, Paul Young,
realizes finding a safe vaccine that works
is just the start.
Perhaps the bigger challenge
will be executing on production and deployment.
The 64 million dollar question
is whether we can get this vaccine out into the community
in time for it to make a difference.
There's absolutely no doubt that deployment
of the final vaccine is as big a hurdle
as actually generating the vaccine itself.
If we're dealing with a viral pathogen
that is affecting, essentially, the global community,
manufacturing that at scale, at single sites,
is probably not going to be viable.
So the real issues of the effectiveness of the vaccine
become almost secondary to our ability to deliver it
to a broad, global population.
Young's answer?
To essentially proceed on a dual track.
What the global community needs to think about
is a completely radical way of approaching this question.
If we can ramp-up that manufacture
at the same time we're determining efficacy,
then hopefully we'll be able to deploy a lot earlier
than what a traditional pathway
of vaccine production would mean.
Viruses like Coronavirus
have high mutation rates
which allow them to adjust to different environments
and replicate efficiently.
Evidence suggests two strains of COVID-19 already exist.
But while different strains of influenza
can require different vaccines,
that's not expected in the fight against COVID-19.
At least not yet.
Whilst we are seeing mutations accumulate,
we don't believe that they're going to have
a significant impact on vaccines
and whether those vaccines are going to be effective.
So I don't see this virus moving towards
a more potent, more highly dangerous virus.
I think the real challenge with this particular pathogen
is its capacity to spread.
And it's doing that very efficiently.
Of course, it's plenty dangerous at the moment
and doesn't appear to be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Able to survive in the air for up to four hours
and remain viable on a variety of everyday surfaces,
from one to four days,
COVID-19's endurance boosts its transmission.
It is a lengthy one.
This is a virus that's going to be with us for some time.
There are many epidemiologists who think
that the virus is likely to become globally endemic
and be with us in perpetuity.
If I had to bet,
I would think that that is the most probable scenario.
And that just amps up the urgency
for a vaccine to protect communities
from COVID-19's most dire consequences.
But until any such vaccination
can be adequately developed and deployed,
the battle against this deadly infection
must take place on another front altogether.
Vaccines have their place in an outbreak response.
But, obviously, the time it takes to develop them
means that standard public health measures
right upfront are really where we need to place
a lot of emphasis at the moment as well.
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