Summary of NatGeo’s “when a COVID-19 vaccine is ready” article

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/how-we-will-know-when-coronavirus-vaccine-is-ready-cvd/ – published on 30 Jun 2020.

I just finished reading the above linked article from NatGeo. Following are two new things that I learnt :

1. WHO is ok with approving any vaccine that works at least on 50% people! (this is new to me – very important to note) – although an “ideal” vaccine candidate is one that works at least 70% times (again as per WHO itself)
2. Only around 50% of a population typically agrees to get vaccinated even after a vaccine is declared safe and effective (“vaccine hesitancy” – I didn’t know about this useful ino when I made my video). Also, women are more unsure than men (though not by much) when it comes to deciding if they want to get vaccinated (the article doesn’t offer any explanation for this).

There are four more key points in the article – that I have already known about and explained in my VATSANALYSIS video (it’s super insightful, crisp and also somewhat funny – you will love it – scroll down to see it).

Those four additional points in the NatGeo article are:

1. When vaccine approval is rushed, healthy people suffer (and even die) // the article begins with a 1976 example – and later gives few more recent examples
2. 140+ vaccine candidates are in different test stages (in my video, I could claim 100+ but then I had published it a month ago; also the best place to keep track of all the vaccine candidates is here).
3. The article also offers a broad (but dry) overview of the three phases of clinical trials // I’ve obviously explained this in great detail in my video (with nice animations and jokes and all that)
4. Some vaccines are more effective (like that for polio – once you take it, you are almost sure you will never get the disease) while other vaccines are not that effective (vaccination against Malaria approved in 2015 example) // this is a nice way to put things in perspective which I didn’t do that well in my video analysis. I did however talk about the ineffectiveness of many existing vaccines and said towards the end of the video, how we don’t really know that once the vaccination against Covid is out, would we need to take it just once, or once every year or every few years? We still don’t know.