More Than What Meets The Eye : Covid Vaccine

02 May, 2021

Among all the myth ,hype and fears  of covid vaccine , worth noting some key points that help us mature in our outlook to covid vaccine .
Lot of research published in science direct , point to additional immunity ,and prevention of pandemic that may usher in a herd immunity so to say.
The complications of reactions and clotting effects seen in some are probably due to protein vectors used in the vaccine.
 This does give us a thought on the options of the nextgen  vaccine , the PANcorona  vaccine , that might come.
 But these stray effects are seen in less than 0.5% of the population and direct correlation to only the vaccine are not esblished. Hence the fastest way in the current pandemic situation would be a door to door vaccination .
Even in the context of an explosive outbreak and loss of lives seen in the Indian subcontinent , important  note that  60% of indian population could already be having antibodies and could have remained asymptomatic.

(Cover cartoon: https://www.cagle.com/jimmy-margulies/2020/12/vaccine-side-effects?)

In 2017, three leading vaccine researchers submitted a grant application with an ambitious goal. At the time, no one had proved a vaccine could stop even a single beta coronavirus—the notorious viral group then known to include the lethal agents of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), as well as several causes of the common cold and many bat viruses. But these researchers wanted to develop a vaccine against them all.

Grant reviewers at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) deemed the plan “outstanding.” But they gave the proposal a low priority score, dooming its bid for funding. “The significance for developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine may not be high,” they wrote, apparently unconvinced that the viruses pose a global threat.

Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation.

For Eva Schrezenmeier, a nephrologist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, the news was sobering: Among 40 patients with transplanted kidneys at her hospital who’d been vaccinated against COVID-19, only one was churning out the antibodies that would likely protect him from the disease. Because transplant patients take powerful drugs to suppress the immune system so it doesn’t attack a donated organ, her team expected diminished responses to a vaccine. But Schrezenmeier, who posted a preprint describing her study last week, hadn’t anticipated just how badly the vaccine might falter in her patients.

Her finding is at the grim extreme of research on how well COVID-19 vaccines work in the many millions of people whose immune systems are suppressed by drugs or disease. In many, the vaccines do seem to maintain their potency. But in others—particularly organ transplant recipients and those taking certain immune-dampening medications—effectiveness is less assured or even absent. To learn more, researchers are launching larger studies, seeking more clarity and ways to help patients whose weakened immune systems make protection against COVID-19 all the more urgent. “There is a lot of confusion and fear among patients,” says Alfred Kim, a rheumatologist at Washington University in St. Louis who cares for people with the autoimmune disease lupus and strongly urges vaccination
for them.

Publisher: Dr.Venkat | rangalakshmii netralaya