Covid-19 and the vaccine wars - EDITORIAL

Covid-19 is short-form used to describe the dreaded pandemic, caused by a new strain of coronavirus, ‘CO’ standing for corona, ‘VI’ for virus, and ‘D’ for disease. Since it was first recognised in China in November 2019, in a brief 18-month period, the disease has spread like wildfire worldwide. At 31 July, 197,000,000 persons worldwide had contracted the disease.

The World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on 11 March 2020. 
 By 29 February 2020 the virus had spread to all corners of the globe.
While the virus was spreading, with no fanfare the first people in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine were not part of a clinical trial. On 29 February, virologist Chen Wei, a Major General in China’s army, and six military scientists on her team stood in front of a Chinese Communist Party flag and received injections of an experimental COVID-19 vaccine. 
 In the US, the Trump administration’s $10.8 billion Operation Warp Speed accelerated vaccine R&D faster, specifically for the US population. 

An equally massive effort unfolded in China. CanSino and two other Chinese companies - one owned by the government, the other working closely with its regulatory agency - also invested substantial resources, testing four candidates in tens of thousands of volunteers around the world. 
The outcome of efficacy trials - just behind the encouraging early results-were announced within a two-month period by Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, and Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology.

Russia was the first to announce it had created a vaccine ‘Sputnik V’ which was successful in combating the coronavirus. 
China using strict lockdowns and isolation of areas where the virus was spreading was inoculating its population without fanfare.

Unfortunately, rather than pooling resources to defeat the disease, western pharmaceutical companies and media belittled the efforts Russia and China were making to neutralize the onslaught of Covid-19. 
Big Pharma condemned the Russian vaccine on spurious grounds. The west-backed media took over.
Russia’s claim of having produced a Covid-19 vaccine were met with scepticism and dismissal. This despite the prestigious ‘Lancelot Magazine’ confirming the veracity of the Russia’s claim.

The pharmaceutical wars were beginning. Not competing to make the best treatment available to victims, but rather, to promote own vaccines even at the expense of truth.
China’s efforts to combat the Covid-19 drew harsh criticism, with even the then US president stepping into the debate - attempting to weaponise Chinese methodology of using the lockdown at Wuhan between January 2020 as an example. 

At the time, western countries condemned China for the harsh restrictions and rigid enforcement it imposed. From late January until June, the city was effectively sealed off from the rest of the country.
But, the methods proved successful. Today China is held up as one of the virus success stories. It neutralized, to a great extent the onslaught of the virus via enforcement of isolation and its vaccine implementation programmes, using only vaccines developed in China.

Despite these obvious successes, western-backed propaganda still attempt to paint Chinese (eastern) vaccines as being of low quality, ignoring facts on the ground -these self-same vaccines which neutralized the Covid-19 in China - and are still keeping that country relatively free of the dreaded Delta variant which is hitting many countries worldwide.

The Beijing-based pharmaceutical company Sinovac produces Coronavac -an inactivated vaccine- which works by using killed viral particles to expose the body’s immune system to the virus without risking a serious disease response. A method similar to the rabies vaccine.  
Associate Prof. Luo Dahai of the Nanyang Technological University in an interview with the BBC described the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines developed in the West as mRNA vaccines. It means part of the coronavirus’ genetic code is injected into the body, triggering the body to begin making viral proteins, but not the whole virus, which is enough to train the immune system to attack.

As these vaccines are new the Professor added, there is currently no successful example of them being used in the populations.
This paper does not claim to have the answers to which system provides better and safer method of combating the deadly Covid-19. But one fact stands out. Rather than belittling each others efforts, if Big Pharma could collaborate for the sake of humanity, finding the best cure would not be difficult.