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| from BBC News |
In “Could Covid vaccine be taken as a pill?”, Maddy Savage (2021) reports that in Sweden, there are attempts to develop COVID vaccine in the form of a dry-powder vaccine that can be taken viaan inhaler or a pill to protect people against COVID-19 in the future. According to the news article, Iconovo, a company, and ISR, an immunology research start-up, have been working together to produce and test the effectiveness of their dry-powder vaccine on the Beta (South African) and Alpha (UK) variants of Covid-19 in mice only. The chemical substance that the company uses to produce the dry-powder vaccine is different from the current liquid COVID vaccines produced by Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca. While the dry-powder vaccine consists of manufactured Covid-19 virus proteins, the liquid COVID vaccines contain RNA or DNA that is genetic code for the proteins of the COVID-19 virus. As a result, the Swedish company claimed that the dry-powder vaccine has some advantages over the current liquid COVID vaccines, because it can withstand temperatures of up to 40C so that it can be easily distributed without storage in refrigerators and it can also be used easily by patients without healthcare providers. In addition to what Iconovo and ISR are working on, Ziccum is another company in the country that has been testing a technology to produce future vaccines in forms of air-dried or liquid that can provide full effectiveness of protection.
Reference
Savage, M. (2021). Could Covid vaccine be taken as a pill?. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57553602
Horrible as it has been, and annoying as it continues to be, when I read things like the article that Emma has summarized for me, I'm impressed by what our species can do today. In the past, people would pray and die. Today, within about one year, human scientists were able to create from scratch vaccines that might not cure Covid, but that in most cases can protect us from its worst effects. While it would be much better had Covid never arrived, we are least fortunate it did not strike just ten years earlier, when we could not have been nearly to able to handle it: not only would producing a vaccine so quickly have been possible, the option of working from home would have been far less than it has been. Did Zoom and Google Meet even exist ten years ago?
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