After almost two years of putting up with COVID-19 and all the attendant social distancing requirements and protocols, we have come to a point of almost (I repeat, almost) reducing the virus to an endemic situation where we will have to get a COVID booster shot every year, probably for a long time. COVID-19 was defeated, though not without considerable loss of life, even here in the United States, and it left many people who survived with residual health problems. We probably got a late start on attacking SARS CoV 2, the virus that causes the disease, especially here in the US, but in many respects we were ready for it. We had all the epidemiological and public health factors already in place when the virus first made its appearance in China in 2019, and we attacked it with all the expertise of a military operation. Multiple countries went to war against the virus, and though the virus won many battles against us, we eventually brought it under control. Here is what we did.
I don’t know how the virus first got going in humans, whether it came from animals or was leaked from a lab in China, but once it was identified as a unique disease, we had all the appropriate protocols and procedures in place to enable us to begin to attack it. First on the list was the ability to isolate the virus in culture. The ability to grow viruses in culture has been around for so long I can’t even remember when the first culture was made. Growing the virus in culture allows us to get a lot of the virus in a short period of time so we can study it. It also gets the virus in pure form, uncontaminated by other viruses. This is essential in beginning the manufacture of vaccines, and in deducing the sequence of the virus’s nucleic acid. (Coronaviruses have RNA as their nucleic acid.) That was the first step.
A lot of this was done in China in the beginning of the outbreak, and the information was made available to everyone else around the world in short order. Much of the work in getting the nucleic acid sequence of the virus required a procedure known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. But we didn’t have to all of a sudden develop PCR just to sequence COVID-19, PCR had been developed in the late 1980’s, and has proven to be such a powerful tool in molecular research, not just in virology, that the inventor was given a Nobel Prize for his invention.
Another very important development in the production of a COVID-19 vaccine was the utilization of messenger RNA (mRNA) as a vaccine product. COVID-19 is the first time mRNA vaccines have been used on a wide scale in immunizing people in such a large outbreak. But like PCR, we didn’t have to develop mRNA vaccines from the ground up just for COVID-19, the technology to make such a vaccine has been around since at least the late 1980’s, and all we had to do was adapt it for COVID-19. This is why the vaccines came along so quickly. Well, relatively quickly. It still took several months to ramp up production on the vaccine in order to make millions of doses, and to test it in volunteers through a double-blind trial so we knew that it was safe and efficacious. (No sense making a vaccine if it won’t work.)
Once we got people vaccinated, we began to get it into people’s arms. You may have heard of the term “herd immunity” used by some of the experts in public health. This isn’t a new term. It was developed many years ago by epidemiologists to refer to the percentage of people who have to be resistant to a disease, either because they were immunized or rendered immune by having the disease, to stop the spread of a disease organism, such as COVID-19. Again, we knew what to do. We didn’t develop all these things just because a new disease came along, we were ready. And we put our knowledge to work. And it worked.
In short, COVID-19 challenged us to rise to the occasion and defeat this monstrous disease. We reacted swiftly, as swiftly as possible, and struck back with vaccines that did all they were expected to do.