How did scientists make COVID vaccines so quickly?
Here's a look at how vaccines are made.
Here's a look at how vaccines are made.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00Right now we're in a race to save lives. So we cannot wait. So I would say to those people who
00:06are fearful of the vaccine being made too fast, it's not fast-tracked in a way where we're making
00:13shortcuts and we're not worried about long-term effects. It's just that it gets pushed to the
00:18front of the line. When you're looking for solutions in the vaccine, it depends on what
00:35the goal is. Some researchers' goal is to attack the virus itself, maybe using its ligands that
00:43you see that pop out like spikes. Maybe you want to attack those and maybe destroy the virus itself,
00:48or you want to use your cells and hijack your cells' machinery and tell it to attack the virus
00:55or not accept the virus at all. Maybe build something around your cell to protect it from
01:00the COVID virus from even attaching to your cell. Because any virus needs a human to survive.
01:07A virus is not a living thing.
01:14In the vaccine race to get to an actual treatment, you have to go through
01:24mice, you have to go through chimps, you have to inject them with your
01:28compound. You cannot call it a vaccine quite yet. You can only call it a compound. You can call it a
01:36solution.
01:46Once phase one trials start, you determine what dosage is the lowest that will have an effect on
01:54the human. So you want to start low. Once you start at a low concentration of this
01:59vaccine, this future vaccine, you start increasing the dosage from when it starts affecting a human
02:06to when it is too much. And somewhere in between there, you are giving different doses to
02:14two different humans.
02:20It becomes more randomized with the amount of people that you choose for your trial. So you
02:26want all types of people. You want people with varying ages, you want people with varying
02:33sociodynamic statuses, you want people of varying races and backgrounds and all of that. It is
02:40important to have as much spread data as possible when you are doing your trials.
02:48And in phase three is the biggest trial of them all because you increase your sample size
02:52and you start comparing the standard of what is already out there, if there is such a thing,
02:58to your new drug. And then you compare to see if it is any better.
03:02If it is any better, then that's great news.
03:17So now we are just looking at side effects. So you start building side effects of this vaccine.
03:33So for instance, Moderna, if they get FDA approval for their vaccine,
03:39in order for the entire world to get this vaccine, they will have to license out their product.
03:44So Moderna will license out their product to other manufacturers who can make it. And those
03:50manufacturers get all the raw materials that are necessary and start making it and distribute it.
04:08Considering that we have been in this for less than a year, it does seem very fast.
04:13But again, in the FDA journey of creating a drug at all, from the moment of conception
04:22until the approval of the FDA, there is a lot of waiting time. There is a lot of downtime
04:28because the government is slow. The FDA is a government entity and it just runs really slow.