Short Wave - A COVID-19 Vaccine: What You Need To Know

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

Approximately 200 COVID-19 vaccines are being actively developed, a process that health officials are expediting to help end the pandemic. Today on the show, NPR science correspondent Joe Palca walks us through the latest in vaccine development — from how a coronavirus vaccine would work to the challenges of distributing it to the world.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody. Emily Kwong here, Inver Maddie, who is off today. So Joe Palka, science correspondent, you are stuck with me. I can live with that. Joe, you have been reporting on the pandemic for months now, and specifically one crucial part of this story, vaccines. Right. I think vaccines are pretty much the way out of this. Most people agree.

It's been so far the most success. tool in preventing infectious disease. But of course, we don't have a vaccine right now. And so that's why we're doing all these other things like shutting things down and social distancing and wearing masks and washing our hands, et cetera, until we do have a vaccine that's safe and effective and available. Right. And we're basically hiding from the virus in the meantime. Right. But I've heard that vaccines have traditionally taken years to develop. So what are we doing to speed up the process? Well, quite a lot, actually. And just to give you one example, a couple of weeks ago, I got a virtual tour of a vaccine facility in Baltimore. What you're looking at here is one step of a multiple step process.

It's run by a company called Emergent Biosolutions. And Sean Kirk oversees the manufacturing and technical operations. And what he's doing is he's pointing his cell phone camera through a glass window into another room with several large stainless steel pieces of equipment. You can see the bag's taken out the top. You see it. So what's going to go inside this bag is actually, believe it or not, insect cells that have been modified to make proteins from the coronavirus that's going to be used to make the vaccine. Wow. The technicians are loading this bag into a 50-liter stainless steel vessel that's part of what's called a bioreactor. Around the outside of this is the vessel itself that provides the heating.

the cooling and with the inserted agitator, the mixing. The cells are spitting out a protein that's going to become the coronavirus vaccine. All this is being done with the strict standards of the food and drug administration, and the vaccine is from a biotech company called Novavax. And Emergent says they're ready to make hundreds of millions of doses of it on a short time scale. Hold up, Joe, because I thought there weren't any approved vaccines yet. So what's happening here with this manufacturing?

Yeah, well, you were asking what's going to speed up the process, and this is part of the answer. They're not just waiting to see if the vaccine works. They're doing what's called at-risk manufacturing it. They're getting ready to make hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine, and when they finish testing it, it might not work. Okay. But the government says, we don't have any choice because we can't wait until we find out of it works to start manufacturing it, because that'll just add months and months to the process. So they're getting going right away.

Sounds like kind of a gamble, but we don't really have much of a choice. Is that right? Well, that's what people are saying. I mean, it's a gamble that health officials say we have to make if we want to have a vaccine that's going to be around in time to put a stop to this pandemic. Okay. Today on the show, what you need to know about a coronavirus vaccine, from how it works to the challenges of distributing it to, you know, the world.

This is Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. Okay, Joe Palko, let's start with some vaccine basics. I read there are over 100 vaccines in development for this coronavirus, and all of these vaccines are trying to do the same thing, trigger an immune response from your body without actually getting you sick. Yes, I've been thinking about it as a little bit like showing a picture to someone and say, if this person comes to your door, don't let them in. And that's essentially what you're doing with a vaccine.

Right. And I guess there are a couple different ways a coronavirus vaccine can maybe trigger that response. Tell me about a couple of them. Well, one thing you can do is you can actually kill a virus. What does that mean? Well, it's not really alive. But let's say you treat it with heat or formaldehyde. It's no longer working.

And you inject that into somebody. Well, it has the shape of a virus and the look of a virus, but it doesn't do what a virus does. So the immune system can respond to that. That's kind of how the polio vaccine that Jonas saw came up with. Or you can take the virus and modify it so that it's no longer able to make someone sick. That's basically what the Sabin polio vaccine. It weakened the polio virus so that the immune system saw it, made all the right responses, but didn't cause disease. And since those two, there have been a myriad of different ways.

it's just the idea of getting the immune system to recognize parts of the virus so that it'll have an immune response without actually making somebody sick. All right. Let's talk, too, about why vaccine development takes so long. Because we mentioned earlier it's normally a very step-by-step process, and I'm guessing that's why it takes a while, right? Well, yeah. I mean, there are lots of steps in the process. First one is to make sure that the vaccine is safe. I mean, you're going to be giving it to a lot of people, so you want to make sure it doesn't cause any problems on its own. Pretty important. And then you want to make sure

it has an immune reaction, an immune response. So you measure the cells that people make or the proteins that they make from their immune system after you've given them the vaccine. And then you want to make sure it prevents them from getting sick from the coronavirus. None of these sound like easy tasks, I got to say. Yeah. No, it's all time-consuming. It's all difficult. It all requires a lot of people and patients and coordination. And you can't really speed it up. I mean, if you want to see if something's going to work for six months, you kind of have to wait around for six months to see if it's going to work. Right. And so with this coronavirus, we're seeing manufacturers trying to compress the timeline. But this takes a lot of money and a lot of financial risk. So Dr. Anthony

Fauci of the Coronavirus Task Force thinks we can develop a vaccine by the end of this year because the government is helping these manufacturers financially through. Operation Warp Speed. Here's Fauci speaking with NPR's Rachel Martin. It's risky. So, Joe, aside from this, what else can be done to move the process along? Well, I mean, one of the things you can do is just get a lot of people working on the problem at the same time. And then you can also do things that will make sure that the regulatory process is smooth. So the Food and Drug Administration is coming along with you in every step so that they don't have to review everything after you've done it. They can review every.

as you're doing it. But this idea of having a lot of labs involved is something that's going to really be helpful. And I talk with Dr. Lewis-Falo over at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. His team is developing something. It's a patch with micro-needles that contain tiny bits of the coronavirus. And the micro-needles are so small that you don't even feel them. So you slap on the patch and wait a few weeks. And boom. Immunity. Coronavirus patch. If it works. Yeah, if it works, but this is just one approach. And I think that they will basically feed off of each other. This is going to help us to do these trials both quicker and to find a vaccine that's

most effective when we start to be able to compare these different approaches. So, Joe, let's say sometime in the future we have a winning vaccine or a few vaccines that are fully approved. How on planet Earth are we going to distribute them? Like who's who is going to get it First, M-E-V-1 vaccination, are those people born on March 10th? This is a scene from the movie Contagent. I know we promised we wouldn't play this movie again on the podcast, but this scene is kind of how a vaccine was deployed, at least in the film. So, Joe, is there a massive lottery drawing in our future to decide who gets the coronavirus vaccine?

I don't think that's going to be the actual way that it's going to be rolled out. Okay. Most of the people I've talked to suggest that it's going to go first to healthcare workers and people who are on the front lines of combating the disease. But then you want to think about the sort of the societal infrastructure. I mean, who makes things go? And I think a number of years ago, people wouldn't necessarily have thought of delivery truck drivers as people who are crucial to the infrastructure of the country.

And yet more and more people are now relying on deliveries, to get stuff. And so they may be considered critical people who need to be vaccinated or they're people who are at high risk for the disease. But the fact is that at some point, we're going to have to figure out a way to get this to everybody.

Right. Seth Berkeley, the CEO of an organization called Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, put it really well. We're not going to be safe as a world unless everywhere is safe. So even if, you know, we have, parts of the world that would have low spread or no spread. If you had large reservoirs of the virus and other places, of course, you have a risk of reintroduction. I like that. We're not going to be

safe as a world unless everywhere is safe. Okay. Last question, Joe. Will the coronavirus vaccine be one that changes every year because the coronavirus changes every year if we know that? Or will it be more like the measles or the polio vaccine? We don't know. We don't know. I wish I could give you a better answer than that. But the answer right now is we don't know. So there's not enough experience with this virus yet to know for sure what's going to happen.

It's possible that there'll be a different version that they'll need to make vaccines against for every year. Or it's also possible, and this is probably more likely, that they'll need to be boosters from time to time, maybe not as infrequently as measles, but maybe more frequently than some, so that it's not clear how long the immune response that you get from a vaccine will work. So the trouble is, it's just, I mean, it's so new the understanding of this virus that people aren't saying anything for sure yet. Joe, do you think you'll be reporting on vaccines for this virus for the rest of your career? It's a big topic. I don't think it's going away.

Well, we hope you stick around to cover it, Joe Palka. Science correspondent at NPR. Thank you so much for coming on the show. You betcha. Today's episode was produced by Abby Wendell and Viet Leigh. Deborah George edited and Britt Hansen checked the facts. I'm Emily Kwong, and this is Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. See you tomorrow.