Fauci warns there’s a risk rushing a coronavirus vaccine. Here’s why
Vaccines have saved millions of lives over the decades and have eradicated diseases that once swallowed communities whole.
Diseases like measles, tetanus, rotavirus and polio no longer lurk in people’s cells or environments because of the careful development of vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Like the CDC says, “it is always better to prevent a disease than to treat it after it occurs.”
But there’s a cost when the meticulous process of developing vaccine candidates is rushed.
Dr. Anthony Fauci —the country’s leading infectious disease expert on the White House Coronavirus Task Force— gave America a brief warning while remotely testifying before Congress Tuesday about the consequences of rushing vaccine trials.
“I must warn that there’s also the possibility of negative consequences where certain vaccines can actually enhance the negative effect of the infection,” he said. “The big unknown is efficacy. Will it be present or absent, and how durable will it be.”
The warning stems from the record-setting development of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Just 62 days after scientists started vaccine development, a promising candidate stands in a phase I trial with two doses already administered in human volunteers, Fauci told Congress from his home while quarantining after possibly being exposed to an infected White House staff member.
The vaccine was developed by the biotechnology company Moderna, Inc, a commentary in Nature said.
Drawbacks of rushing a vaccine
But history has a few stories to tell about the consequences of rushing a vaccine.
In 1955, more than 200,000 children in five states in the U.S. were injected with a polio vaccine to treat the debilitating virus that spreads through contaminated food or water, or between infected individuals, and can affect a person’s spinal cord, causing paralysis.
After what is now known as the Cutter Incident, about 200 children were left with “varying degrees of paralysis,” another 10 were killed and an estimated 40,000 polio cases arose after the process of inactivating the live virus for the vaccine proved defective, according a study in the Royal Society of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It has come to be known as one of the worst pharmaceutical disasters in U.S. history, but it did in fact lead to a better system of regulating vaccines, the CDC said.
In the 1960s, children were again injected with a vaccine to treat respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), but instead children “developed an enhanced form of the disease, suffering high fever, bronchopneumonia, and wheezing,” an Association of American Medical Colleges article said.
Urgent vaccine needed
But unlike the polio incident which injected people with weakened portions of the virus itself, this vaccine, coined mRNA1273, for the coronavirus will try to force the body to produce its own “virus-like bits, which it will then train itself to combat,” according to Stat.
“This is very unusual,” Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale University microbiologist, told the outlet. “It reflects the urgency to develop vaccines to counter the COVID-19 pandemic.”
It’s unusual because the traditional timeline to develop a vaccine is about 15 to 20 years, Mark Feinberg, president and CEO of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, told Stat.
But some experts believe that’s just not possible given the current spread of the coronavirus.
Vaccine development
Typically, a vaccine is first tested on animals like mice, and then later on larger animals like pigs or cattle.
About 2.5 million animals every year will be part of vaccination testing processes to ensure the vaccine is safe and protects against a particular pathogen, and to see if it triggers side effects, according to PETA.
While mRNA1273 was not properly tested on animals, virologists with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told Stat in an email they tested the vaccine on mice the same day they recruited people for the trial.
“Those mice showed the same sort of immune response generated by a similar mRNA vaccine against [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome] (MERS), another coronavirus,” Stat said.
Next are clinical trials in humans that involve three separate phases that go from small groups with about a dozen people to groups with thousands, an Association of American Medical Colleges article said.
Each step along the way is heavily monitored by federal officials.
Fauci told Congress the National Institutes of Health recently launched a public-private partnership titled “Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines” to “prioritize and accelerate clinical evaluation of therapeutic candidates with near-term potential.”
“Hopefully our research efforts, together with the other public health efforts, will get us quickly to an end to this terrible ordeal that we all are going through,” he said.
This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 12:19 PM with the headline "Fauci warns there’s a risk rushing a coronavirus vaccine. Here’s why."
