Quote:
Originally Posted by Arthurgray50@blu
I am not a medical person.
But l would like to know how they create a vaccine to destroy the latest virus outbreak.
And if so, if penicillin works on various bugs. Why cant the present anti biotics work on Covid 19
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I can chip on this too...
For a vaccine, there are three options;
- Grow the virus, kill it and inject that (see Salk Polio vaccine and flu vaccine)
- Weaken the virus to give a low level infection (see Flumist flu vaccine, MMR)
- Produce virus components and inject this (see hepatitis B vaccine)
Option 1 is the easiest to do and pretty cheap. The downside is that the inactivation process might make the vaccine less effective as your immune system will recognise inactivated virus and not active.
Option 2 is an excellent choice as weak virus are excellent to stimulate the immune system and give a good response. However, there are safety concerns that the virus might go back to being active
Option 3 will take the longest time but the components can be engineered to give a very strong immune response. It is also the safest as no virus is used during the manufacture of the vaccine
Vaccine design is tough as you need something that is strong enough to'tickle' the immune system in to making a response but not so strong that it can cause strong responses such as anaphylactic shock. You don't want to end up killing someone who is already immune for example. Ideally, the vaccine shouldn't need boosters when you want to vaccinate whole populations.
Vaccines aren't 100% effective - they won't make every person who has the vaccine immune. However, as long as you have enough people vaccinated, the chances of an unvaccinated person meeting someone who is infected AND that person spreading the diseaseto them willeventually shrink to very low levels. Herd immunity...
On the antibiotics - bacteria can do their own chemistry using their own metabolism. Virus needs a host cell and uses a lot of the host cells metabolism to survive. Antibiotics attack the bacterias own metabolism. For example, penicillin affects a bacteriums ability to make cell walls. As virus uses the host cell metabolism, you would need to block the host cells metabolism to stop the virus.
There are a few antivirals out there that will attack the few chemical reactions unique to virus or stop the virus entering cells but these are sill few and far between.