00:01As authorities struggle to respond to the COVID-19 viral pandemic,
00:06everyday life is drastically altered
00:09by travel restrictions, school closures,
00:12and diminished business and social interactions.
00:16It is the most extensive lockdown the world has ever seen.
00:20But even as much of our world appears on the verge of completely shutting down,
00:25some among us jump into action.
00:30From the outset of the outbreak,
00:34the scientific community quickly geared up for an urgent battle.
00:38Each pathogen has its own path that it takes in that context.
00:43And this one has surprised many of us in terms of the speed
00:46with which it spread through the Chinese population
00:49and then subsequently the speed with which it has impacted other countries more globally.
00:56This is a disease that is completely new.
00:59So we don't know really a lot.
01:02Every day that goes by, we learn more.
01:06At the same time, this is a very fast-moving target.
01:09And so the more data we have, the better it is.
01:13And that knowledge forms the backbone of a critical quest.
01:17To develop a vaccine to help defeat COVID-19.
01:20The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, supports vaccine research around the world.
01:41But the transition from theoretical endeavors to real-world needs happened more quickly than anyone anticipated or hoped for.
01:52This is the most frightening disease I've ever encountered in my career.
01:57And that includes Ebola, it includes MERS, it includes SARS.
02:01And it's frightening because of the combination of infectiousness and a lethality that appears to be many-fold higher than flu.
02:13But despite the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologists and government health officials must face a harsh reality.
02:23Vaccine development and testing takes time, at least 12 to 18 months.
02:30The vaccine is quite down the road at this point.
02:35And now there are a lot of programs that are starting worldwide to find those weapons to fight the disease.
02:43We'd be giving this to normal people to prevent infection.
02:48So you must be sure, the edict of medicine, first do no harm.
02:55So we need to make sure it's safe, and we need to make sure it works.
03:00That entire process will take at least a year and a year and a half.
03:09Professor Paul Young leads one of the most promising research operations at the moment,
03:14with his team at Australia's University of Queensland, thanks in part to a CEPI-funded slight head start.
03:22For the past six years, they've focused their work on broad-based vaccine modeling, using mRNA coding,
03:31an adaptable methodology able to quickly respond to new viruses as they emerge.
03:37So we've developed a generic platform technology for vaccine production that could be applicable to a wide range of viruses,
03:47and that's why we've been able to apply it to this previously unknown virus relatively rapidly.
03:54Amid the initial escalation of the public health emergency in the city of Wuhan,
03:59the Chinese released the genetic sequencing of this new coronavirus, COVID-19, on January 10th of 2020.
04:08As soon as that was done, we began work on developing our vaccine approach to it.
04:14We made more than 200 different versions before we settled on one particular vaccine candidate,
04:22and that has already gone into animal studies to prove that we actually induce an immune response that is likely to protect animals.
04:30Once we've done that, and we've also gone through toxicity studies,
04:34then we'll hopefully be ready to enter clinical trials, human clinical trials, in late June.
04:43COVID-19's spike-like structures exhibit a specific protein to gain entry into its host cells in order to replicate.
04:54One of the prime immune responses is an antibody response that targets that particular protein on the surface of the virus.
05:03And that can generate a neutralizing activity or a killing activity that destroys the virus.
05:10Young's line of attack aims to unleash the body's defenses by introducing this protein, stabilized or clamped in position,
05:20as it would appear on the virus's surface.
05:23So that when we vaccinate individuals, their immune response sees this protein as though it was the virus itself.
05:32They will mount an immune response that can then become their memory response if they subsequently encounter the live virus.
05:41So we're trying to mimic the outer exterior of the virus by generating this particular protein as the vaccine immunogen.
05:50Disease pandemics litter human history.
05:53But vaccination technology is a relatively recent tool in our medical arsenal, one that arose kind of by accident.
06:03A response to smallpox in the 18th century, thanks to the discriminating eye of Dr. Edward Jenner and others.
06:12People used to say, you know, find a milkmaid. She'll be the most beautiful girl in town.
06:17Jenner deduced the women's work impacted their appearance.
06:22In putting two and two together, the reason they never got smallpox is because by milking their cows,
06:30they got blisters on their hands, which were called cowpox.
06:35And getting blisters on their hands prevented them, immunized them, we would now say, from getting smallpox.
06:43So he created the first vaccine, a thread soaked in a concoction of cowpox material,
06:50and exposed it to patients by cutting a small slit in their arm.
06:55And it wasn't until almost 100 years later that we began to understand that there was such a thing as an infectious disease,
07:02and that the reason people didn't get most infectious diseases twice is because they were immunized.
07:10As scientific understanding grew, so too did the use of vaccines to do battle against some of our most feared diseases, like polio.
07:22The parents of 440,000 grammar school children in 44 states gave their permission for injections of the preventive series of three Salk shots.
07:32The first three children inoculated were Dr. Salk's own sons, but thousands of others across the country soon joined us for the largest field test in medical history.
07:43To this day, smallpox is the only eradicated human disease.
07:50But thanks to global vaccination efforts, polio remains only in small pockets.
07:57Still dangerous, but held largely at bay.
08:01I joined this hospital in 1990.
08:04So 20 years back, there were 3,000 new cases of paralytic poliomyelitis in the city of Delhi alone.
08:11Today, we have none in Delhi, and in the last year I think we have had none in the country.
08:21Vaccines are very important for producing what we call herd immunity.
08:26And herd immunity is really the ways in which we can offset the risk of large spread of disease by immunizing a large portion of the community from it, which means it's much harder for it to spread.
08:41And that's helped control many childhood diseases, like measles, mumps, and rubella.
08:48And although a lot of people think measles is not so bad, I had it when I was six years old, and it seemed pretty bad at the time.
08:56But nowadays, we have a vaccine for it, and people don't remember that there have been many documented epidemics in which measles killed 30% of the people it infected.
09:06You know, after the eradication of smallpox, and as polio eradication efforts really became more successful,
09:14in the mid to late 20th century, there was a feeling that perhaps the human race had gotten infectious diseases licked.
09:22And they were on the retreat, and perhaps we could conceive of an era or a time when infectious disease was not necessarily a global health threat.
09:34But by the 1970s and 80s, previously unknown diseases emerged, like Ebola and HIV-AIDS.
09:47So diseases like these were utterly new to science, and figuring out ways to respond to what we now see as new or novel pathogens has become the battle of the 21st century.
10:03Enter the most recent coronaviruses, SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19, a global pandemic, which demands a collaborative global response.
10:20I think this is the moment to think open data and open science. That would really make a difference.
10:30One thing that a major epidemic does is it galvanizes a lot of attention, a lot of funding, a lot of focus on these diseases themselves.
10:38There are multiple vaccine approaches going forward, including our own, and we're all of the belief that we're not racing each other.
10:47This is a race against the virus, and whoever gets there first in terms of a viable vaccine, we can all cheer for that.
10:54Indeed, CEPI supports several research teams engaged in the coronavirus fight, including the NIH vaccine program that went forward with the first human trials on March 16th in Seattle, one of America's first COVID-19 hot spots.
11:12It was easy. It was just like a flu shot. I hope that we get to a working vaccine quickly and that we can save lives.
11:26Still, Australian virologist Paul Young realizes finding a safe vaccine that works is just the start.
11:35Perhaps the bigger challenge will be executing on production and deployment.
11:40The $64 million question is whether we can get this vaccine out into the community in time for it to make a difference.
11:49There's absolutely no doubt that deployment of the final vaccine is as big a hurdle as actually generating the vaccine itself.
11:57If we're dealing with a viral pathogen that is affecting essentially the global community, manufacturing that at scale at single sites is probably not going to be viable.
12:09So the real issues of the effectiveness of the effectiveness of the vaccine become almost secondary to our ability to deliver it to a broad global population.
12:21Young's answer? To essentially proceed on a dual track.
12:27What the global community needs to think about is a completely radical way of approaching this question.
12:35If we can ramp up that manufacturer at the same time we're determining efficacy, then hopefully we'll be able to deploy a lot earlier than what a traditional pathway of vaccine production would mean.
12:51Viruses like coronavirus have high mutation rates, which allow them to adjust to different environments and replicate efficiently.
13:01Evidence suggests two strains of COVID-19 already exist.
13:06But while different strains of influenza can require different vaccines, that's not expected in the fight against COVID-19, at least not yet.
13:16Whilst we are seeing mutations accumulate, we don't believe that they're going to have a significant impact on vaccines and whether those vaccines are going to be effective.
13:26So I don't see this virus moving towards a more potent, more highly dangerous virus.
13:35I think the real challenge with this particular pathogen is its capacity to spread and it's doing that very efficiently.
13:42Of course, it's plenty dangerous at the moment and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon.
13:49Able to survive in the air for up to four hours and remain viable on a variety of everyday surfaces from one to four days, COVID-19's endurance boosts its transmission.
14:04It is a lengthy one.
14:05It is a lengthy one.
14:06This is a virus that's going to be with us for some time.
14:11There are many epidemiologists who think that the virus is likely to become globally endemic and be with us in perpetuity.
14:19If I had to bet, I would think that that is the most probable scenario.
14:25And that just amps up the urgency for a vaccine to protect communities from COVID-19's most dire consequences.
14:34But until any such vaccination can be adequately developed and deployed, the battle against this deadly infection must take place on another front altogether.
14:44Vaccines have their place in an outbreak response, but obviously the time it takes to develop them means that standard public health measures right up front are really where we need to place a lot of emphasis at the moment as well.
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