THE past few weeks have the world agog with much talk about vaccines that will be given to everyone, wipe out the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide, and voila, restore all to "normal," i.e., pre-pandemic status all over.
Call me a forever skeptic, but let us -- in my mother's words -- "maghunos-dili." Let us think again, and with care.
Without going into conspiracy theories, let us take a good look at what at the very least one well-placed expert has to say about this vaccine frenzy.
Ken Frazier is the CEO of Merck and Co., the pharmaceutical giant, yes.
Posted on July 13, 2020, on the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge page is a lengthy interview with him about the vaccine situation vis a vis Covid, among others, like institutionalized racism, too.
Frazier's own words, while we "hunos-dili":
"Well, first of all, it takes a lot of time. I think the record for the fastest vaccine ever brought to market was Merck in the mumps vaccine. It took about four years. Our most recent vaccine for Ebola took five and a half years. And why does it take so long? First of all, it requires a rigorous scientific assessment. And here we didn't even understand the virus itself or how the virus affects the immune system. We're starting there. We're starting with a spike protein as the antigen. What we're hoping to be able to do with these different approaches is to create a vaccine that we can study quickly that can be both safe and effective and can be durable. Those are three different issues. No one knows for sure whether or not any of these vaccine programs will produce a vaccine like that. What worries me the most is that the public is so hungry, so desperate to go back to normalcy, that they are pushing us to move things faster and faster. But ultimately, if you're going to use a vaccine in billions of people, you better know what that vaccine does." We were saying, "hinos-dili"?
More of Frazier's words: "There are a lot of examples of vaccines in the past that have stimulated the immune system, but ultimately didn't confer protection. And unfortunately, there are some cases where it stimulated the immune system and not only it didn't confer protection, but actually helped the virus invade the cell because it was incomplete in terms of its immunogenic properties. We have to be very careful." A vaccine is not necessarily magic.
May I urge one and all to head over to that aforementioned Harvard Business School Working Knowledge page and listen to and read the transcript of the interview with Frazier (https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/merck-ceo-ken-frazier-speaks-about-a-covid-cure-racism-and-why-leaders-need-to-walk-the-talk?fbclid=IwAR3sLWXYtV4u-FJFM8euJMKc3dFZVvlHXzxI97-vYAsEvC03jhQSpG1Hnv2M).
At least start there, and go on to studies that paint a real picture of the much bruited about vaccines that are supposedly ready to go by December, this very month.
The scientific literature suggests, actually, that we "hunos-dili."