Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Editorial: Vaccines a huge step in war on disease

The COVID-19 vaccines in circulation represent not just our best option for taming the epidemic, they are a huge step forward in the war on disease. That’s because they employ a completely new ­technique in fighting infection.
TC_128672_web_Vaccine-6.jpg
A B.C. health-care worker receives the COVID-19 vaccine. [via Government of B.C.]

The COVID-19 vaccines in circulation represent not just our best option for taming the epidemic, they are a huge step forward in the war on disease.

That’s because they employ a completely new ­technique in fighting infection.

In the past, vaccines used weakened strains of the real disease to provoke an immune response in the patient. In effect, the patient was made sick with the disease, but not to the point where serious symptoms appeared.

That triggered two responses. First, it geared up the patient’s immune system to fight the foreign invader, just as if the real disease were present.

Second, it created antibodies which remain in the blood system after the invaders are destroyed, in effect becoming an early warning system.

If at some future time, possibly years ahead, the person encounters the real disease, these antibodies form a first line of defence. They hold off the infection long enough for the body’s other shielding mechanisms to build up strength.

The downside of this technique is that it often took years to develop new vaccines — sometimes a decade or longer. That’s because, in part, producing sufficiently weakened strains of most infectious disorders is a lengthy process.

Prolonged testing is required to ensure the vaccines created in this way find the exact balance. They have to be active enough to provoke an immune response, while not going further and making the patient sick.

The new COVID-19 vaccines don’t work that way. Instead researchers isolate what’s called a “spike ­protein” on the surface of the virus.

This protein has none of the constituents that make up the real virus. Rather it’s like the bar code on a store product — simply a form of marker.

When patients are inoculated with this marker, their immune system recognizes that it doesn’t belong there, and antibodies are formed to fight it.

Once that happens, the patient is protected against the COVID-19 virus.

There are several benefits of this new approach. First, there is no danger of infecting patients with the real disease. The protein is merely a unique identifier, not the virus itself.

Second, the process of developing a vaccine is greatly accelerated. Within weeks of COVID-19 first appearing, researchers had identified its protein spike.

It took only weeks longer to develop trial vaccines and begin field tests.

Of course, challenges remain. A handful of patients inoculated with the new vaccines have developed allergic reactions.

In itself, that’s no surprise. Every vaccine holds this risk, as indeed does every medication.

In addition, most of the patients who developed severe reactions were elderly, some with terminal ­diseases. It’s not clear yet how many of these instances were due to the vaccine itself.

Nevertheless, as with any new drug, the question is whether the benefits outweigh the risks. There is enough evidence now from multiple countries where the vaccine is in use, that the benefits do, indeed, far outweigh the risks.

And there is further cause for hope here. Several other diseases, some cancers among them, as well as various genetic disorders like multiple sclerosis, also contain spike proteins.

While this has been known for some time, the laboratory techniques used to develop the COVID-19 vaccine might also be used to fight those disorders.

If that turns out to be the case, it would be a huge step forward.

Medical science usually proceeds by small increments. Cancer treatment is a good example.

The death rate in men from prostate cancer has declined steadily over the past 30 years, but with no great leap forward. Likewise, women’s death rates from breast cancer have followed the same path.

And some of these improvements are due to ­screening programs, like mammography, which detect the disease at an earlier stage.

The full reach of this vaccine technology remains to be seen. But it would be a godsend if, in the middle of a pandemic, a revolutionary way to fight disease should be found.