Are They Ignoring the Oxford Vaccine?
Why is the UK going with vaccine from the German-American combo BioNtech vaccine and not the English Oxford one made by friends of the blog, Oxford University. I am impressed that the Oxford group aimed to make the vaccine so inexpensive that it’s less than a cup of coffee.
Astute readers will know that I am a fan of Oxford, the university, and the comma. It goes before the final “and” in a series and provides clarity when a list can be read two ways. I think it should be required to prevent confusion, as in:
If Vaccines were Cars
When it came to making a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, The American firm Moderna and the German firm BioNTech used cutting-edge high tech to produce vaccines made of synthetic RNA. Never been tried before. Risky.
Oxford took a more conservative route and used tried-and-true methods.
If vaccines were cars, they would be Tesla Roadsters and Porsche 911 Targa 4.
Oxford's Vaccine Uses New and Old Methods
Don’t panic. Let’s start at the chimp in the upper left corner.
The old part of the method is that you start out with a chimpanzee virus that infects people, but doesn’t make them sick. It gets into your cells, but doesn’t do anything. This virus is used in lots of successful vaccines.
Next, you make SARS-CoV-2 messenger RNA that tells your cell to make spike protein. Essentially, this is the Moderna/BioNTech vaccine approach. Once your cell dissolves the chimp virus, the mRNA appears and tells the cell to make spike protein and covid will be destroyed if it attacks..
What Could Go Wrong?
Apparently, a lot.
Things began to head south when AstraZeneca researchers apparently ran out of covid cases in England and added a Brazil testing center.
They needed to combine all the sites to get statistical power. Things got dicier when they learned a contractor had given people half doses. In the end, this group had about 90% better antibody response than the controls. Scientists are concerned that the group appeared to conceal some results not consistent with their hopes.
Results are encouraging, but unclear. The Oxford group’s final recommendation was for more studies to clarify how well the vaccine works.
Look for the vaccine to be out sometime next year—if all goes well.
Whew, this one took lots of research and time. I’m thinking of stepping back to every other day.
See you the day after tomorrow.
