Much Ado About Vaccine
January 17
5min read
Vaccination has been a key part of global governments’ strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The development process is less than 12 months since the virus’s emergence, the novel coronavirus is the fastest vaccine. Prior to this, the fastest vaccine development timeline was four years for the mumps in the 1960s.
By December 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s vaccines for emergency use. Since then, a number of other COVID-19 vaccines have emerged. Indonesia received its first batch of vaccines made by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac in the same month and launched its vaccination program with the President’s vaccination in January 2021.
The past year has been an education on vaccine for all of us as new types of vaccine continue to emerge. To get all the confusion out of the way, let’s dive deep into the world of vaccines.
Let’s start with the very basic question of how does a vaccine work.
A bacterium, virus, parasite, or fungus that causes a disease is called a pathogen. The pathogen consists of several parts, including an antigen. An antigen actually works against the pathogen, triggering your body to form antibodies that build a defense against it. The body has the ability to destroy the pathogen and the disease once the process is complete.
When you get a particular disease from a pathogen, the natural antigen helps your body build that immune system. The catch is you get horribly ill in the process. This is where a vaccine comes in. Instead of waiting for you to catch that virus, a vaccine makes your body build those antibodies on its own without catching the disease.
The how of this gets a bit complicated, especially with the different types of vaccine available.
At this point in the pandemic, you’ve heard all the different types of vaccine—mRNA, viral vector, inactivated. What does it mean exactly? To keep it simple, there are two different ways a vaccine gets your body to produce antibodies to build immunity.
The first is to introduce the virus in a safe way. Inactivated vaccines use this method by introducing viruses with damaged genetic materials, which prevents the virus from replicating. COVAXIN and SINOVAC are considered inactivated vaccines. Live attenuated vaccines also does this using a weakened form of the virus that cannot cause illness. This type of vaccine has been used for smallpox and rubella, but so far no available COVID-19 vaccines are using this method. Protein subunit vaccines also use the virus to trigger an immune response, but it does so using only a part of the pathogen, mostly protein fragments.
The second is to introduce a cell that provides instructions to your body to create an antigen. Nucleic acid vaccines directly order your body to make the antigen through genetic material (RNA or DNA). To this day, no RNA or DNA-based vaccines have ever been approved. The mRNA vaccine however, debuted with Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccines, works pretty much in the same way using the part of the RNA that tells your body how to produce the protein to trigger the antibodies. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccines are viral vector vaccines do the same thing. Instead of using mRNa though, it uses a different harmless virus.
Vaccination has been a key part of global governments’ strategies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The development process is less than 12 months since the virus’s emergence, the novel coronavirus is the fastest vaccine. Prior to this, the fastest vaccine development timeline was four years for the mumps in the 1960s.
By December 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) approved Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s vaccines for emergency use. Since then, a number of other COVID-19 vaccines have emerged. Indonesia received its first batch of vaccines made by the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac in the same month and launched its vaccination program with the President’s vaccination in January 2021.
The past year has been an education on vaccine for all of us as new types of vaccine continue to emerge. To get all the confusion out of the way, let’s dive deep into the world of vaccines.
Let’s start with the very basic question of how does a vaccine work.
A bacterium, virus, parasite, or fungus that causes a disease is called a pathogen. The pathogen consists of several parts, including an antigen. An antigen actually works against the pathogen, triggering your body to form antibodies that build a defense against it. The body has the ability to destroy the pathogen and the disease once the process is complete.
When you get a particular disease from a pathogen, the natural antigen helps your body build that immune system. The catch is you get horribly ill in the process. This is where a vaccine comes in. Instead of waiting for you to catch that virus, a vaccine makes your body build those antibodies on its own without catching the disease.
The how of this gets a bit complicated, especially with the different types of vaccine available.
At this point in the pandemic, you’ve heard all the different types of vaccine—mRNA, viral vector, inactivated. What does it mean exactly? To keep it simple, there are two different ways a vaccine gets your body to produce antibodies to build immunity.
The first is to introduce the virus in a safe way. Inactivated vaccines use this method by introducing viruses with damaged genetic materials, which prevents the virus from replicating. COVAXIN and SINOVAC are considered inactivated vaccines. Live attenuated vaccines also does this using a weakened form of the virus that cannot cause illness. This type of vaccine has been used for smallpox and rubella, but so far no available COVID-19 vaccines are using this method. Protein subunit vaccines also use the virus to trigger an immune response, but it does so using only a part of the pathogen, mostly protein fragments.
The second is to introduce a cell that provides instructions to your body to create an antigen. Nucleic acid vaccines directly order your body to make the antigen through genetic material (RNA or DNA). To this day, no RNA or DNA-based vaccines have ever been approved. The mRNA vaccine however, debuted with Pfizer’s and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccines, works pretty much in the same way using the part of the RNA that tells your body how to produce the protein to trigger the antibodies. Meanwhile, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccines are viral vector vaccines do the same thing. Instead of using mRNa though, it uses a different harmless virus.