COVID‐19 vaccines: what do we know so far?

Abstract

When the novel coronavirus was described in late 2019, it could not have been imagined that within a year, more than 100 vaccine candidates would be in preclinical development and several would be in clinical trials and even approved for use. The scale of the COVID-19 outbreak pushed the scientific community, working in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies, public health bodies, policymakers, funders and governments, to develop vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 at record-breaking speed. As well as driving major amendments to the usual timeframe for bringing a vaccine to fruition, the pandemic has accelerated the development of nextgeneration technologies for vaccinology, giving rise to two frontrunner RNA vaccines. Although none of the critical safety and efficacy steps have been skipped within the compressed schedules, and the technologies underpinning the novel vaccines have been refined by scientists over many years, a significant proportion of the global population is sceptical of the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines and wary of potential risks. In this interview-based article, we give an overview of how the vaccines were developed and how they work to generate a robust immune response against COVID-19, as well as addressing common questions relating to safety and efficacy.

Perceptions towards COVID-19 Vaccines and Willingness to Vaccinate in Nepal

“…COVID-19 vaccines were developed in record time. This raised concerns for many whether any of the processes were bypassed and whether the vaccines are safe [51]. In our cohort, a majority (771, 64.5%) agreed on COVID-19 vaccines being safe and risk-free (Figure 1).…”

The FEBS Journal in 2022: trust the science and treasure the data

“…However, although we are not quite out of the woods yet, we are now in a much better place than we were just one year ago. Multiple vaccines have been developed, with astonishing speed, and these dramatically reduce the risk of severe illness associated with SARS‐CoV‐2 infection [1]. Several more vaccines are on the cusp of approval, and other therapeutic approaches are also in the pipeline.…”

Professor Dame Janet Thornton to receive ‘The FEBS Journal Open Science Award’

“…Open Science, in all of its forms, has greatly aided scientific progress through more open sharing of data sets, software, reagents, computational tools, molecular structures and much more. As a consequence, research progress has quickened and has become more collaborative, and nowhere was this more evident than during the COVID-19 pandemic when the sharing of data, preprints and other resources was instrumental to numerous scientific breakthroughs concerning the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the development of multiple vaccines at breakneck speed [1,2].…”