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UK Vaccination Progress Update

3 Replies Christopher Roberts

The UK has set out its steps to reduce coronavirus restrictions. It’s hoped the fantastic progress of the vaccination programme will mean this is the last COVID-19 lockdown in the UK.

We’ve been told that decisions will be informed by the data, so let’s dig into the stats!

Cases – and the rate of infection

Cases have been dropping for the last seven weeks, from a high of 414k confirmed cases in Week 44 – 4th of Jan to 10th of Jan. The ONS estimated 1 in 50 people had the virus in England in the last week of 2020. That’s now dropped to 1 in 145 people.

The rate of infection (the “R” rate) has been below 1 for seven weeks now – by my estimates, which are based on the reported positive test results.

An “R” of 0.9 means every 100 people with the virus, infect a further 90. An “R” of 1.1 means those 100 people instead infect 110 people.

Cases are going in the right direction, although I’d argue it’s not cases that matter anymore.

UK COVID-19 Cases, Hospitalisations, Deaths and Vaccinations

Hospital Patients

The reason we’ve all been asked to “Stay at home” is to “Protect the NHS” and “Save lives”. The more people who get ill with coronavirus, the more pressure that puts on the National Health Service.

It’s okay to have COVID-19 cases if nobody goes to hospital. Thanks to the vaccine roll-out, fewer people are, and here’s a great visual tweet explaining why.

Vaccination almost completely eliminates the chance of getting severe or moderate symptoms!

There are still significant numbers of people in hospital, but it’s now less than half the peak and dropping further.

Deaths

The vaccine will reduce hospital admissions, but it’ll also reduce deaths – even more significantly so.

Even a single dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines is proving to have a significant impact on immunity to COVID-19. This is great news and will be contributing to the rapid fall in deaths in the UK.

In just five weeks, the UK has gone from ~8.7k coronavirus deaths a week to ~2.3k. To put that in perspective, around 3.2k people sadly die from cancer each week.

Vaccines

Here’s why the UK has been able to set-out it’s roadmap out of lockdown: the vaccine roll-out.

The UK is vaccinating the entire adult population (53 million people) meaning it needs to administer 106 million vaccinations.

So far over 1 in 3 people have had their first dose, and the programme is already over 20% complete.

UK COVID-19 Vaccine Progress

If the UK continues to roll-out vaccinations at the current rate, it’s set to meet, if not exceed its targets to re-open the country.

All the data I’ve shared in this post comes from the UK Gov Coronovirus Dashboard. Predictions are based on my interpretation of this data and vaccine supply data.

COVID-19 Vaccinations. A Call for Cooperation

1 Reply Jonny Hankins
Pharmaceutical Production Plants

Arguing In Europe

This week here in Europe we have seen an argument develop within and beyond the EU about COVID-19 vaccines. The EU has accused AstraZeneca of not fulfilling its contractual obligations to the block, as it has not (or cannot) provide the block with the amount of vaccines it promised.

The British press have started to suggest the EU are going to stop the vaccines getting to the UK, with part of the problem being that according to the International Federation of Vaccine Manufacturers, about 76% of major vaccination manufacturing capability lies in Europe, most within the EU.

Now the EU is threatening to block exports from factories in the block until they have their vaccines that they say they have been promised.

This will not only affect the British, who I think are the target for this proposal, but I can only presume many parts of the world. And vaccine availability was anyway (to say the least) unevenly distributed.

To what degree can this be seen as a technological problem? Or an open science problem? From the technological perspective I think the answer is plain to see. The path chosen to get out of the COVID pandemic is what we in my world call a technological fix, in this case a vaccine that has been developed using cutting edge technology in a very short time. As a previous post explained, these vaccines use synthetic biology techniques, read more here.

A Ray of Hope

Each company can only produce so much of the final product. But in another breakthrough, this week a competitor has decided to start producing AstraZeneca’s vaccines for them in one of their facilities. A breakthrough! Cooperation!

If Sanofi (the French manufacturer that is going to join in) then why can’t others? And not only in Europe obviously. Across the globe.

The European concentration of production and wealth leads to massive discrepancy in availability across the world. According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, data shows that rich nations representing just 14 percent of the world’s population have bought up 53 percent of all the most promising COVID-19 vaccines so far.

The alliance says that nearly 70 countries will only be able to vaccinate one in 10 people against COVID-19 next year unless urgent action is taken by governments and the pharmaceutical industry to make sure enough doses are produced.

So it appears to me that this kind of technological fix benefits some people more than others. But I ask myself if this has to be the case. Couldn’t other facilities be pressed into action across the globe to use spare capacity to produce more vaccines? Couldn’t this be done in the name of humanity rather than profit?

Cooperation in a time of crisis?

How does the UK Approved COVID-19 vaccine work?

4 Replies Jonny Hankins

Synthetic Biology Technology has brought us to the point today that the UK has accepted one of the COVID-19 vaccines for distribution, with the promise that distribution will begin soon. This result has taken just 10 months, how have the pharmaceutical researchers managed to do this? Through advances in technology.

In reality, there are different types of COVID-19 vaccine currently in trials:

1: Live attenuated vaccines

Some well-known vaccines for other infectious diseases are based on weakened versions of a virus.  These are known as live attenuated vaccines.
The viruses are weakened to reduce virulence by culturing cells in a laboratory, and then processed into a vaccine. After people come into contact with these attenuated viruses through vaccination, the virus will not be able to replicate easily in humans. As a result, our immune system has enough time to learn how to fight against this weaker form of the virus. This approach enables us to become immune without getting sick.

2: Inactivated vaccines

Inactivated vaccines contain viruses or bacteria that have been killed, which are either whole or in pieces. When our immune system detects these dead viruses or bacteria or their fragments, it can learn to recognise the fragments. After this, we are protected. If we are infected by the live version of the virus or bacteria in the future, our immune system will recognise the virus or bacteria and respond more quickly to protect us from infection – so we will not become ill.

3: Subunit vaccines

If the vaccine only contains particular pieces of a virus or bacteria, it is known as a subunit vaccine. When that subunit can be recognised by the immune system, it is referred to as an antigen.
Extensive research is being carried out on subunit vaccines for protection against COVID-19. An important subunit of SARS-CoV-2 is the spike protein or S protein, which is attached to the exterior of the virus. The virus uses the S protein to make contact with another protein which is located on the exterior of the cells in our lung vesicles. If the virus attaches itself to a human cell via the S protein, the virus can penetrate the exterior and enter the cell. Then the cell is infected.  Because the S protein plays such an essential role in the infection process, it is targeted by many vaccine developers. If we are infected by the live version of the virus in the future, our immune system will immediately recognise the virus and we will not become ill.
 

4: mDNA and mRNA vaccines (m stands for messenger)

DNA and RNA vaccines add a new piece of genetic material – deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) or ribonucleic acid (RNA) – to specific immune cells in our body. The targeted cells are often a particular type, which absorb and break down a virus or bacteria. The immune cells that have broken down a virus or bacteria then show a piece of the virus or bacteria (a subunit known as an antigen) to other immune cells so they learn to recognize the antigen. That is why these immune cells are also referred to as antigen-presenting cells. The cells that learn to recognize the antigen are called lymphocytes. DNA and RNA vaccines allow the antigen-presenting cells to detect a piece of the pathogen without the cell first having to absorb and break down the live version of the virus or bacteria. If we are then infected by the live version of the virus or bacteria in the future, the lymphocytes will recognize the antigen for the pathogen, neutralize the virus or bacteria, and we will not become ill.

There are also DNA and RNA vaccines that use ‘normal’ body cells instead of immune cells. These cells also present the antigen to our immune system, which ensures that we will not become ill if we do get infected. 
These DNA and RNA techniques are new, and a DNA or RNA vaccine has not yet been approved for any human disease. A number of DNA vaccines have already been used successfully for animals.
 

5: Vector vaccines

Researchers can modify existing viruses to act as vaccines. Once that happens, they are no longer viruses, but vectors. The viruses have been adapted in such a way that they do not display exactly the same behaviour as unmodified viruses. The difference compared to the real viruses is that vector viruses:

  • can no longer make someone ill;
  • (often) cannot replicate themselves, and;
  • not only contain their own RNA or DNA, but also have a piece of RNA or DNA from another virus within them. All pieces of RNA or DNA can work as an antigen, so the cells in our immune system will react to the vector virus as well as to part of the vaccine virus. This is how immunity is developed.

A category of viruses that are often adapted into a vector are the adenoviruses. Adenoviruses are a group of viruses to which people are often exposed, but which cause no or only mild illness. Because adenoviruses are so common, our immune system is very good at dealing with an adenovirus infection.

This article in Nature goes into further detail.

The vaccine approved today in the UK from Pfizer/BioNTech is an mRNA vaccine. This is cutting-edge technology, and the first time such a vaccine has been approved!

To produce an mRNA vaccine, scientists produce a synthetic version of the mRNA that a virus uses to build its infectious proteins. This mRNA is delivered into the human body, whose cells read it as instructions to build that viral protein, and therefore create some of the virus’s molecules themselves. These proteins are solitary, so they do not assemble to form a virus. The immune system then detects these viral proteins and starts to produce a defensive response to them.

Synthetic Biology!