By Ilona Kritz July 23, 2020 Covid-19 vaccine. (Photo from Pixabay) The Covid-19 outbreak has lasted for almost eight months, wit...
July 23, 2020
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| Covid-19 vaccine. (Photo from Pixabay) |
The Covid-19 outbreak has lasted for almost eight months, with over 200 countries infected and 135,000+ cases daily. There are over 5000 deaths reported daily, and no sign of any vaccine or cure becoming available, due to our limited knowledge of the virus. This pandemic is not going to stop anytime soon and will continue to infect thousands of people until an effective vaccine is developed, but there isn’t going to be one for years.
Vaccines are the main defenses for fighting all sorts of infectious diseases; they help halt infections and provide immunity. As good as that sounds for battling Covid-19, production of a vaccine for a virus we do not know much about can take 10-15 years, with a great deal of testing and approval required along the way.
Even so, various health authorities have said the target date for the Covid-19 vaccine is August 2021, which means the epidemic will have spread for almost two years without a vaccine possibly coming out. This is only the goal too; the actual date for delivering a vaccine for Covid-19, if the work proceeds as it typically does for most vaccines, is May 2036, 16 years from now. That means an entire decade-and-a-half without the vaccine for the virus, the only defense we could possibly put up against the potentially deadly disease it causes.
Consider also that other extremely infectious diseases such as dengue, malaria, and HIV/AIDS do not have effective vaccines even after years of research. These diseases have been around for years, and despite years of work an official licensed vaccine for any of them has not been released. Covid-19 is a recently discovered disease, unlike these diseases that have been plaguing countries for years on end, so the prospects of a vaccine seem even more unlikely.
Even if a vaccine against Covid-19 is successfully made, drug manufacturers can only produce so much vaccine in a given period of time. The entire world needs the vaccine, every single person, but first the vaccine needs tons of testing, research, and approval, and a way to mass produce it for the billions of people that need it has to be found. Distributing the vaccine to everyone in every corner of the world can take ages to do.
But we can still hope to reach our goal of August 2021 or sooner, as countries worldwide are working hard to create the vaccine and combat Covid-19 in other ways. However, judging by all the factors and everything we can work with right now, the struggle can last for more than just 2 years, and possibly even a decade at a realistic pace. Until then, practicing good hygiene, social distancing, and other safety measures is still our best defense.
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