Microbe Whispering The Covid-19 Vaccines

Excerpt from: Microbe Whispering in Covid Times: A Mystical Path through Science.

6 - What Sorts of Strategies Can Kill It?

This pandemic has resulted in many tragedies and has highlighted both the fragility and the strength of our biological defenses, and that of our environment as a whole.

In terms of our human population, not all of us will die.

And those who survive will have a tolerance for the infection. Those of us treated with vaccines will also have some protection.

Our ancestors from the earliest recorded human history and from many countries and cultures have created ingenious solutions

to treat those of us sickened by microbes such as the smallpox virus and the polio virus.

We have come a long way from those early groundbreaking discoveries in human health, so that now, in 2021, more than twenty life-threatening diseases are preventable with a vaccine. Research is revved up into high gear to create new vaccines to protect us against the virus that causes the new disease COVID-19. I will describe what a vaccine is and how to understand the path of the vaccine from lab to you.

While I do know that there are folks who are afraid or suspicious of vaccines, my goal is to give you the facts.

I will give you the tools to separate fact from conspiratorial fiction. In that way, you yourselves can make your own decisions about which vaccines to take and when to do so. It is true that there are some places in the world where vaccines are mandatory. Sometimes this occurs when an outbreak of an infection is so pervasive that there is no other way to quell the spread and fatalities by a disease. If you are in a place in the world where you are free to make your own decision about being vaccinated, I hope that you can overcome your fears about it by learning as much as possible about vaccines. Microbe Whispering in Covid Times, is a good starting point.

COVID-19 Vaccines in Progress

The general idea behind a vaccine is to stimulate our immune response to something related to the virus of concern.

This element or factor in the vaccine needs to have enough biochemical similarity to the actual infectious agent, the virus, so that the immune system is "tricked" into making antibodies against the virus of concern. There are many molecular and biochemical strategies that vaccine researchers can use. Here are a few examples:

Genetic Vaccines:

Vaccines that use one or more of the coronavirus’s own genes to provoke an immune response.

There is a complex and well-designed system for vaccine development in health care systems around the world.

Viral vaccines are tested first in an artificial lab environment, or a "petri dish" scenario, to determine if the vaccine actually recognizes the protein or element of the virus that it is designed to disrupt in some way. This "petri dish" environment includes animal testing and is very involved. Animals that are used sometimes have to be genetically modified to mimic the human body, such as making sure the test animal has ACE2 receptors, like humans do, in the case of testing a novel coronavirus vaccine. After these tests have been determined successful, the vaccine trials advance to the next phase. These figures sum up the sequence of vaccine trials used by the CDC and followed by many other countries.

COVID-19 Vaccines in Progress

Around the world, lab-coated figures are blurry with speed as their nimble, gloved fingers manipulate thousands upon thousands of vials,

molecular tools, and machines. Their analytical minds and devoted hearts are focused in support of the medical teams that are toiling to a breaking point, developing a vaccine (or vaccines) that will prevent COVID-19 infection.

(Read more in my book: Microbe Whispering in Covid Times: A Mystical Path through Science)

Contagion Live

and can be accessed here: https://www.contagionlive.com/news/the-covid19-live-vaccine-tracker.

Right now, pharmaceutical companies have pushed timetables with unprecedented rapidity,

resulting in new treatments that are available now and are being distributed globally. More information on tracking the rate of progress for these trials is available on Contagion Live.

Vaccinations

play an important role in the development of "herd immunity" for a population of people.