Vaccinated!

Nancy and I got our second doses of COVID-19 vaccine yesterday (Pfizer, if anyone is wondering). Full immunity should kick in within a couple of weeks, and we will likely be spared the worst ravages of this horrible disease. We will, of course, still be taking whatever precautions are necessary and mandated by our healthcare professionals; no vaccine is perfect and being older, our immune systems are not as capable as they used to be. I expect we will be wearing masks for quite a while yet, at least when shopping indoors or when using public transit. 

I was struck today at how smoothly everything went. We got our shots at a community center in Scarborough and were in and out in just over half an hour. Everyone was friendly, professional, and well organized. Even the needle was (almost) painless. 

We are lucky that the pandemic happened when it did, and not twenty or thirty years earlier. We take it for granted now, but the internet and worldwide web made it much easier for scientists to share information, and then for governments to organize mass vaccination. Even little things, like the workers at the clinic using tablets to record check our identity and record our vaccination status into the provincial health system would have been much more cumbersome in 1990. 

Most importantly, development of the vaccine would have taken much, much longer. Fast, reliable, and cheap gene sequencing tools weren't available thirty years ago. The mRNA technology used in the most effective vaccines is only a few years old. 

I'll end this with a link to an article from Nature that looks at the rapid development of our COVID-19 vaccines and what made it possible. 

When scientists began seeking a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in early 2020, they were careful not to promise quick success. The fastest any vaccine had previously been developed, from viral sampling to approval, was four years, for mumps in the 1960s. To hope for one even by the summer of 2021 seemed highly optimistic.

But by the start of December, the developers of several vaccines had announced excellent results in large trials, with more showing promise. And on 2 December, a vaccine made by drug giant Pfizer with German biotech firm BioNTech, became the first fully-tested immunization to be approved for emergency use.

That speed of advance “challenges our whole paradigm of what is possible in vaccine development”, says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. It’s tempting to hope that other vaccines might now be made on a comparable timescale. These are sorely needed: diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia together kill millions of people a year, and researchers anticipate further lethal pandemics, too.

Go, science!