Day 90: Old-School Vaccines

On the world stage, cases are at 3.3 million and deaths at 233,000, with recoveries having finally hit one million. Spain is conflicted in its case count, only reporting PCR-based positive cases, while the counting sites include antibody-based test results, but even a disparity of more than 20,000 cases does not affect Spain's second-place standing. The UK is currently eyeing France's fourth-place spot, and Russia has jumped up to over 100,000 cases (including the Prime Minister), passing Iran to earn 8th place.

The US is at 1.07 million cases with 62,000 deaths, not to mention 30 million unemployed. New York is still its own country, with 309,000 cases and 23,730 deaths. Unfortunately, Massachusetts is firmly in 3rd place at 62,000 cases, despite being up only 3% again today. We also have about 1,000 patients currently in intensive care.

Science Mag reports on an "old-school" vaccine already in human trials in China after having worked in monkeys. The old-school approach consists of killing the virus and injecting it into people. (PlagueBlog notes that if you're really old school, you don't kill the virus first.)

On the new-school side, you genetically engineer a virus "vector" to include a target nucleotide sequence from the real virus. Oxford University has been working on one of these for a while. Today they announced an agreement with AstraZeneca for further development and production of the ChAdOx1 adenovirus vector vaccine.

The New York Times has a neat interactive report on all the time factors involved in making a vaccine (and how to squeeze them down), but it focuses more on the potential of new technology like mRNA vaccines, because they reduce the pipeline issues involved in various older-school approaches.

Also on the old-school vaccine front, yet another paper about the BCG vaccine is out in preprint. (For a bunch of previous papers, see Day 71.) This one seems much improved in that it breaks down vaccination status and COVID-19 outcomes by age group. (Plus, there's an app for playing with the numbers yourself.) Their somewhat counterintuitive conclusion is that a real correlation exists between BCG vaccination and improved pandemic outcomes, but it's not a correlation with historical vaccination of the susceptible elderly population. Instead, much more recent BCG vaccination would appear to be keeping the young people from spreading the virus to its eventual victims.