The race for coronavirus vaccines: a graphical guide

-19 vaccine two years away, and could be NZ-made - research leader A Covid-19 vaccine is being described as the Everest of medicine, and the race is on to beat corporate interests to the top of the mountain, Professor Graham Le Gros from Malaghan Institute says. The government has announced $37 million towards a vaccine strategy with the goal to generate adequate supplies of a safe Covid-19 vaccine at the earliest possible time. Of that $10m will go to into local research and $5m will support manufacturing capability. Prof Le Gros heads biomedical research at the Malaghan Institute and is working on a New Zealand-made vaccine. "The only way we can get our economy, our health and our lifestyle back on track is to have a vaccine so that we can start to operate," he told RNZ's Checkpoint. He said supporting homegrown vaccines and investing in production might end up being the best solution for the country.

COVID-19: What is a virus? How do they spread? How do they make us sick? Viruses are the most common biological entities on Earth. Experts estimate there are around 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and if they were all lined up they would stretch from one side of the galaxy to the other. You can think of them as nature’s own nanotechnology: molecular machines with sizes on the nanometre scale, equipped to invade the cells of other organisms and hijack them to reproduce themselves.

Why deforestation and extinctions make pandemics more likely As humans diminish biodiversity by cutting down forests and building more infrastructure, they’re increasing the risk of disease pandemics such as COVID-19. Many ecologists have long suspected this, but a new study helps to reveal why: while some species are going extinct, those that tend to survive and thrive — rats and bats, for instance — are more likely to host potentially dangerous pathogens that can make the jump to humans. The analysis of around 6,800 ecological communities on 6 continents adds to a growing body of evidence that connects trends in human development and biodiversity loss to disease outbreaks — but stops short of projecting where new disease outbreaks might occur. “We’ve been warning about this for decades,” says Kate Jones, an ecological modeller at University College London and an author on the study, published on 5 August in Nature1. “Nobody paid any attention.”

Characterization of pre-existing and induced SARS-CoV-2-specific CD8 + T cells Study cohort A total of 26 convalescent individuals (following a mild course of SARS-CoV-2 infection) and 25 age- and sex-matched historic controls (collected before August 2019) of healthy individuals (including pre-infection samples of longitudinal cases) were recruited at the Freiburg University Medical Center, Germany. A mild course of infection was defined as clinical symptoms without signs of respiratory insufficiency. New poll shows 16% of New Zealanders don’t want to be Covid-19 vaccinated A new survey suggests 16% of us don’t want to receive a Covid-19 vaccine. Josie Adams reports on what this means for herd immunity, and for New Zealand’s strategy to fight the pandemic. A new Stickybeak survey for The Spinoff of New Zealanders’ attitudes to the Covid crisis has found significant opposition to a hypothetical vaccine. Of the 605 respondents in the survey asked “if and when a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available will you aim to get vaccinated?”

Coronavirus: what do scientists know about Covid-19 so far? Coronaviruses have been causing problems for humanity for a long time. Several versions are known to trigger common colds and more recently two types have set off outbreaks of deadly illnesses: severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (Mers). But their impact has been mild compared with the global havoc unleashed by the coronavirus that is causing the Covid-19 pandemic. In only a few months it has triggered lockdowns in dozens of nations and claimed more than 100,000 lives.

IHR 2005 in the Coronavirus Pandemic: A Need for a New Instrument to Overcome Fragmentation? Unprecedented Pandemic and Splintered Global Response With 182 countries reporting 6,663,304 confirmed cases with 392,802 deaths (as of Jun. 6, 2020) and activating various national emergency measures, the outbreak of novel coronavirus in 2020 stands to be recorded as the worst global health disaster in recent history. Amid unprecedented uncertainties swirling around almost all sectors of the global community, the COVID-19 pandemic has also raised complex legal issues, which require systematic analysis once the current crisis is brought under control.

Covid-19: Workers at U.S. Meat Plants Now Have Vaccine Access in Most States Employees at food processing facilities, which had some of the country’s largest known coronavirus outbreaks early in the pandemic, are now eligible for vaccines in at least 26 states, a New York Times survey found. The expansion of vaccines to food processing workers comes amid rapid widening of eligibility, especially for essential workers at greater risk of contracting the virus. Almost every state is vaccinating some subset of frontline workers, but the list of eligible professions varies widely. In at least six states, food processing workers are eligible in certain counties but not in others. Meat and poultry processing facilities have largely remained open even as large outbreaks infected thousands of workers and killed dozens in the first months of the pandemic.

How Vaccines Work How Vaccines Work A vaccine works by training the immune system to recognize and combat pathogens, either viruses or bacteria. To do this, certain molecules from the pathogen must be introduced into the body to trigger an immune response. Coronavirus There are many different viruses. Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that cause diseases in birds and mammals. They are all similar in their shape, and in humans, they often cause upper respiratory illnesses. Transmission of coronaviruses Coronaviruses are zoonoses, which means they can be transmitted between animals and people. This means that they can jump the species barrier. China warned of mysterious virus 6 months ago. Here’s where the world is at now. It's been six months since China first reported a cluster of mysterious pneumonia cases in the city of Wuhan. The culprit became known as "SARS-CoV-2," a new virus that had hopped from a still-unknown animal to humans, spreading across the globe like wildfire. The virus has now reached every continent except Antarctica, devastating remote Indigenous populations in the Amazon and spreading in African countries already devastated by other pathogens. In that time, SARS-CoV-2 has caused at least 10.4 million infections worldwide and killed more than 500,000 people.

Is Russia’s COVID-19 vaccine safe? Brazil’s veto of Sputnik V sparks lawsuit threat and confusion Science’s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation. A confusing and unusually nasty fight broke out this week over the safety of a Russian COVID-19 vaccine known as Sputnik V after a Brazilian health agency declined on Monday to authorize its import because of quality and safety concerns. The stakes escalated yesterday when the Twitter account officially associated with the vaccine said “Sputnik V is undertaking a legal defamation proceeding” against Brazil’s regulators.

vaccine An English doctor named Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796. He saw that people who got the mild disease called cowpox rarely got smallpox, which is more serious. He did experiments to find out why. He scratched material from a cowpox sore into the skin of a healthy boy. The boy got cowpox. Coronavirus Infections—More Than Just the Common Cold Human coronaviruses (HCoVs) have long been considered inconsequential pathogens, causing the “common cold” in otherwise healthy people. However, in the 21st century, 2 highly pathogenic HCoVs—severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)—emerged from animal reservoirs to cause global epidemics with alarming morbidity and mortality. In December 2019, yet another pathogenic HCoV, 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV), was recognized in Wuhan, China, and has caused serious illness and death. The ultimate scope and effect of this outbreak is unclear at present as the situation is rapidly evolving. Coronaviruses are large, enveloped, positive-strand RNA viruses that can be divided into 4 genera: alpha, beta, delta, and gamma, of which alpha and beta CoVs are known to infect humans.1 Four HCoVs (HCoV 229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1) are endemic globally and account for 10% to 30% of upper respiratory tract infections in adults.