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Science has been our saviour - but vaccines have so much more potential

 

When I gazed out of the window of a deserted train sixteen months ago, the sense of anguish and uncertainty I felt was commonplace amongst the majority of the world. The biggest public health crisis in a century was upon us, and no-one truly knew the severity of COVID-19, or how the consequences would shape the world. Perhaps, as the hastily thrashed out blog I wrote on that train lamented, we knew it would affect us, but we had no idea what the reality of that would look like.

Similar to that mid-March afternoon, I write this on a train. This time though, I don’t sit here with the same degree of uncertainty. For the world has adapted immensely in the last year. Masks, hand sanitizer, social distancing. Things that were unusual have become the norm – though I still haven’t found a way to stop my glasses steaming up under a mask!

Credit: www.homelandprepnews.com
But the biggest difference to that last train journey, is that last week, I had my COVID-19 vaccine! Vaccines hold far more long-term benefits than the temporary measures mentioned before. A return to normality depends on them and the effectiveness of the current crop has allowed us to creep slowly back outside and hug our grandparents again in the last few months.

I don’t want to call it a miracle because science is more than that. It is a collection of hard work from supremely talented individuals and teams, incidentally including my own mum, whose own efforts on pandemic planning have earned her an MBE (!) that she is too humble to celebrate vociferously. That is tangential but nevertheless, the speed of the vaccine creation is something staggering and should be celebrated immensely.

Not only that, the technology used in both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines opens up new avenues for future disease prevention and eventual eradication. The mRNA technology used in both essentially acts as a cut-and-paste template to imprint viruses into and… bang, you have a vaccine. Already trials are ongoing for putting the same technology into curing cancer, and it creates the platform to help do the same for malaria, the biggest worldwide killer of the 21st century.

Yes, it is not all as rosy a picture as I may have painted. There remains the distinct threat of a rise in cases, and resulting deaths both at home in the UK and further abroad. Billions are yet to receive their COVID-19 vaccination, and the majority of the burden for this falls on lower-income countries with healthcare systems that could easily still be overwhelmed. But while the Covax scheme is deeply flawed, it alleviates some of these problems and eventually will make COVID-19 vaccines commonplace around the world.

I am breaking the habit of a lifetime and shunning my usually favoured pessimism for some optimism. We owe that to science, because it continues to astound.

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