Some notes on the power of the human mind, great importance of solidarity and our motivation to change.
Author: Bruno Bugla, Redaction: Ph.D. Karolina Petrović
The topic of this essay is perhaps the biggest concern worldwide right now. A scenario that I imagined as the best cinema fiction has become a reality. I found out that scientists have been predicting that such an event would occur for quite some time. As Afelt and colleagues (2018) indicated, rainforests in Southeast Asia have been reduced by 50 percent over the last 70 years, resulting in an increased rate of human and animal contact. Among the wildlife living in these forests are bats, many of which can carry coronaviruses and easily pass them onto humans. The researchers warned that the risk of newly emerging covid-associated diseases in the future should be considered very seriously by the whole of mankind.
Many other scientists came to similar conclusions and identified the interference of humans in animal habitats as one of the main triggers of epidemics and pandemics (Smith, 2014), (Tollefson, 2020). Their thoughts find confirmation in human history since HIV was started by humans eating meat of wild animals (likely chimpanzees), the Ebola virus jumped to humans from fruit bats and the Zika virus spread across the world, after finding a host mosquito that thrived in urban areas (FutureLearn, 2020). What is more, while technological progress has made it easier for us to protect ourselves from diseases, it has also become one of the factors that caused this situation to escalate into a global pandemic. The quickly spreading Sars-CoV-2 originated from China’s Wuhan. Within a matter of weeks, it was detected in Japan and Korea. Then it spread to Europe rapidly. An outbreak occurred in Italy’s Lombardy. The disease began to pop up across Europe, the US, and the rest of North America as well as South America and Africa. The virus spread from China’s Wuhan to all the continents apart from Antarctica within less than a month (Clarke and colleagues, 2020). But how? That is primarily due to global air travel. One of our greatest inventions has turned against us. Nevertheless, I am sure that humankind will defeat this pandemic, mostly through the efforts of the scientist. The question then should not be if, but when…
I believe that we will contain this pandemic mainly by vaccinating a major part of the world’s population. Fortunately for us, in 2020, scientists were able to develop effective vaccines in record time. According to The New York Times (Zimmer, 2021), now we have 8 tested and approved vaccines for full use. Amongst them, the revolutionary: PfizerBioNTech and Moderna. Why revolutionary? That is because they are the first mRNA vaccines to be approved. The use of this particular technology opened the gateways for the quickest vaccine development yet. To truly understand this buzzing topic, I first have to, shortly explain how mRNA vaccines work. As Freelander (2021) claims, traditionally vaccines contain the live-attenuated or inactivated virus, an inert version of a toxin, or just a small part of the virus. However, the process of adjusting these substances, so that they stimulate the proper reaction in organisms, takes years. And that is where the mRNA vaccines save the day.
To develop an mRNA vaccine scientists need just the genetic sequence of the virus (Aparta, 2021). They extract a part of it that contains the instructions for expressing a specific part of the virus. With the COVID-19 virus, they picked out the genetic sequence that creates the spike protein, forged the messenger RNA and placed it inside a lipid nanoparticle (LNP) that would protect it after its injection into our body. Inside, the positively charged LNP sticks to the negatively charged cell membrane, which later incorporates it with the mRNA inside it. That is when the magic happens. The mRNA is like a blueprint or a script for the cell. The cell reads it and produces the viruses’ spikes. Since the spikes themselves do not infect the cells, they are harmless. The immune system recognizes these spikes and trains itself in fighting them. It even destroys the mRNA itself. All that is left after this whole process are “B cells” or memory cells, which will later on quickly stimulate a proper immune reaction in case of an actual Sars-CoV-2 infection (Aparta, 2021).
But the mRNA technology is not really new. It has been developing for half a century now! It took scientists quite some time to make it all work. There were a lot of issues that they had to resolve, such as: the fragility of the RNA, the unnecessary attacks of the immune system on it or simply the size of the mRNA molecule itself, as indicates by Aparta (2021). Luckily, scientists were able to perfect it just before the outbreak of Covid-19. This incredible progress in biotech has equipped us with a very promising weapon against Sars-CoV-2. The two mRNA vaccines have an efficacy of more than 90% (WHO, 2021). More than 1.13 billion vaccine doses have already been administered worldwide according to the research of The New York Time’s journalists at the end of April 2021. That still is not enough, but this number is growing every day.
Moreover, we have contained many other pandemics and epidemics before. So why would not we be able to take control over Covid-19? We eradicated smallpox, contained most of the flu strains and even lived through the bubonic plagues as well as the Spanish flu. The journal Science has published a study that came to a conclusion, that Sars-CoV-2 will become “endemic” - a rare pathogen that sporadically puts people in a dangerous health condition. Lavine (2021) says it is likely that in a few years coronavirus will be no more of a threat than the common cold. It will also narrow the age group that it will target, probably to children under the age of five. However, for that to happen we have to achieve population immunity with the use of vaccines. Otherwise, if we strive for population immunity the natural way, we will experience a similar scenario to the Spanish flu, a colossal number of deaths along the way, especially people with other diseases would be in real danger.
Finally, the third factor that will help us end the Covid-19 pandemic is global cooperation. Governments, numerous organizations, development banks, private donors are all helping to lower the impact of the pandemic. The funding committed to combating the coronavirus is nearing $21.4 trillion (Cornish, 2021). But it is not only about the money. Nurses, doctors, even medicine students put their lives at stake every day. Many people help supply food and basic equipment to the elderly. Scientists exchange their research findings and knowledge with each other to speed up the process of developing new ways to fight the virus. As long as the international cooperation on the political scene is quite a controversial topic since the Chinese government allegedly, did not supply the WHO mission with all the original samples of the virus (PAP, 2021) and the incident when former president Donald Trump pulled out founding from the WHO, some new global initiatives are aiming for global peace and well-being. One of them, Covax, a project co-led by the WHO, supplies vaccines to low-income countries. That is crucial since the dominant countries such as the US and the UK are buying out the vaccines. As Holder (2021) reports, only 0.2 doses have been administered in poorer countries. That gives space for the virus to mutate unsupervised. Even if Sars-CoV-2 will be eradicated or becomes endemic in the high-income countries, a mutation of the original virus from the low-income countries might strike again (Piper, 2021). Hopefully, once most of the higher-income countries vaccinate their citizens, they will make efforts to fight Sars-CoV-2 in lower-income countries, as they did when eradicating smallpox.
As humankind, we are now witnessing events and processes of global importance. Science seems to be called up as the cure. This is a global test of human potential in fighting a previously unknown threat. Human lives are at stake. Luckily, historic wins over worldwide viruses and recent 12 months of fighting Covid-19 have proven, that in the face of a threat we are capable of mobilizing and exploiting the entire potential of science. This is evidenced by the record time the vaccines were invented and produced lately. What is missing at the moment is global vaccinations, which in turn requires worldwide cooperation and solidarity. I am sure we will manage to contain the virus, my only concern is, if people will draw a lesson from this pandemic and stop deforestation and degradation of mother nature. If we do not, we will be constantly putting out fires instead of nipping the cause in the bud. Latest research shows that new zoonotic pathogens appear more frequently than ever before (Ross and colleagues, 2015). It is a harsh and unfair reality for the scientists that put great efforts into research and studies on the devastating human impact on the ecosystem. We get to know all the outcomes, and finally do nothing, until it is too late to turn around. Well, let us hope the pandemic will teach us enough to make great change and let next generations lead happy lives here, on Earth.
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