Just a spoonful of synthetic mRNA helps the COVID rates go down
Samuel Rhydderch
As she skipped around the bedroom trampling on the children’s toys, Julie Andrews famously sang the words “In every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job's a game”.
Except with covid there is no element of fun, the job isn’t a game, and we all snapped a long time ago.
So, it is with an air of desperation and dogmatic hope that we as a nation welcome the breakthrough of not one, not two, but three covid vaccines in quick succession. I can imagine the scenes at the Treasury, as bleary-eyed treasury officials sign off cheques to Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca for hundreds of millions of pounds, having just signed off the last of the £280 billion stimulus – ‘it wasn’t meant to be like this’ they weep softly, as the intern dumps yet another fresh pile of new chequebooks onto the mahogany desks at three in the morning.
And yet if you’re not a treasury official, then there is much to rejoice about at this current juncture. We as a country have become the first nation to officially certify the Pfizer/Biotech vaccine, we have 800 000 doses on British soil ready for ‘V-Day’ on Tuesday, and we have the combined might of our National Health Service and the British Army at our disposal to help distribute this vaccine across the isles. We have a plan and timeframe for distribution, though it is still wise to remember that, as Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. So, it is important, therefore, for the NHS to not punch itself in the face.
What is the timeline? You ask. Well, it’s very simple, if you can remember landing on the Normandy beaches on D-Day to a hail of German gunfire – then you will almost certainly be first in line. This will be closely followed in January by those who will claim to have memory of the Second World War as a one-year-old in 1945. By February we expect all adults living through their mid-life crises to have been inoculated, and by March all those who remember hiding their original Nintendo DS’s under their pillows as parents checked they were asleep will be one of the last to be vaccinated. Anyone with a TikTok account is likely too young to take the current vaccine, since you are presumably under the age of sixteen and not a twenty-one-year-old fully developed adult.
Of course, it wouldn’t really be proper science without someone accidentally administering the wrong dosage to a group of vaccine volunteers before subsequently finding out that, in doing so, that person had inadvertently boosted the efficacy of one of the most anticipated vaccines by 28% and caused a very large headache for whoever had to report the news back to AstraZeneca HQ. And yet, around 3,000 participants in the Oxford/AstraZeneca trial were given the half dose and then a full dose four weeks later, and this appeared to provide the most protection or efficacy in the trial at around 90%. To put this into perspective, if given two full doses then the efficacy lingered at a frankly paltry 62%. This was then followed by some dodgy maths which AstraZeneca put out, which put efficacy at 70%, which according to someone smarter than me corresponds to exactly zero of the numbers put out in their two inadvertent studies. Though I can sympathise with AstraZeneca on this one, I too am very bad at maths – I just happen not to run one of the world’s largest and most-promising scientific vaccine trials.
So how do the vaccines work? Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use this ground-breaking new technology called messenger RNA. To put it very simply the vaccine introduces a set of genetic instructions for the body to reproduce the COVID antigen which the immune system then attacks, hence gaining immunity. It is essentially a trick you play on your body, a trick into building the COVID virus proteins.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is more conventional, using a weakened form of a common cold virus with a Coronavirus ‘spike’ protein added on for the immune system to fight off. The added ‘spike’ is much like being the plus-one nobody wants at the house party, and so it is kicked from that party and a ‘DO NOT ADMIT’ poster with your face (spike) on it is hung in the hallway to let security (your immune system) know that you aren’t welcome.
One of the other issues concerns the distribution of the vaccine. Whilst the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine can be kept in your household fridge, the Pfizer/Biotech vaccine has to preferably be kept at -70 degrees Celsius in an Arctic biological base built out of dry ice located inside an iceberg before being administered to patients in Scunthorpe. That clearly isn’t very sensible, so instead they will very sensibly put some dry ice in a cool box with some GPS trackers and transport them on guarded vans across the UK. The Moderna vaccine has slightly more reasonable requirements meaning they can be kept inside freezers, but the low-maintenance storage requirements of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine will clearly prove to be a winner when it comes to global vaccine distribution across developing nations with limited storage infrastructures.
All pleasantries aside, on whichever side of the aisle you stand when it comes to COVID and the restrictions that have followed, whatever your opinions on how dangerous the virus is – it is clear that this Conservative government will not reinstate personal freedoms until a large number of UK citizens are vaccinated. The final battle to wage will now be against the anti-vaxxer movement rapidly gaining momentum on social media, and in hurried anticipation of this, the NHS is preparing an eye-wateringly expensive vaccine PR blitz involving some unnamed celebrities, and even the Health Secretary has indicated he may take his vaccine live on-air.
So never mind the missed cancer diagnoses and the nine-month NHS backlog, at least you’ll live to see Marcus Rashford plastered across ITV adverts and bus stops in Dagenham with a vaccine in his arm and Matt Hancock giving him the thumbs up. Normal life is now within reach, and I think we can all agree that we will never again take our old lives for granted again. Remember your privilege the next time you throw up in an Uber after a night out at the club, and for the students among us, never again take for granted the simple pleasures of attending a 9am lecture sleep-deprived in December. And who knows, perhaps soon we’ll be able to cross our United Kingdom without being threatened by the devolved the administrations, or worse – Ian Blackford on Twitter.
Photo by Daniel Schludi on Unsplash