Does getting vaccinated really equal to being protected from COVID-19? Not necessarily the case for this pandemic.
2020 is not a normal and peaceful year for all of us on the planet Earth. On February 11th this year, WHO established an official name, COVID-19, for the disease caused by a novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. During the past 11 months, COVID-19 has taken millions of lives worldwide.
COVID-19 was first identified in Wuhan, China, in the late December 2019. Infected patients went through severe pneumonia-like symptoms, even death, during which the phenotypes and pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 were not clear to doctors and scientists, indicating unimaginable difficulties to develop new drugs or vaccines to save lives. After these dark months, more and more biotech and Pharma companies start showing extraordinary clinical trial data for their COVID-19 vaccines thanks to all the frontline scientists and healthcare workers, which is the most exciting news in 2020. However, does that mean we can all live a normal life as long as we get vaccinated? The answer is not yet.
Many of the COVID-19 vaccines target spike protein, the viral protein mediating cell entry of SARS-CoV-2, which hopefully induces our immune system to produce antibodies that block this cell entering process. Several biotech and Pharma companies have shown promising efficacy data from their clinical trials, which gives hope to the world.
However, SARS-CoV-2 has been circulating for about 11 months. As we all know, RNA viruses replicate extremely fast and their genetic materials have low stability and tend to accumulate mutations. SARS-CoV-2 is a single-stranded RNA virus, but it evolves slower than most other RNA viruses due to the enzyme correcting replicating mistakes. Researchers have observed thousands of mutations in the viral genome, but luckily, these mutations seem help the viruses adapt to host cells better instead of facilitating the virus to spread faster or cause much more severe symptoms in patients. However, SARS-CoV-2 is on its way of evolving and becoming more powerful, which is an alarm for all of us. If SARS-CoV-2 keeps transmitting and evolving among humans for months, it is possible that the developed vaccines would not be able to protect us from the new mutated strains.
In addition, based on a pull released this Tuesday, about only 58% of the surveyed American adults are willing to get vaccinated once the vaccines are available on the market, implying that there is still a solid number of people not going to accept the vaccine. Only when sufficient number of people get immunized, the herd immunity can be developed.
Therefore, in order to slow down the spread and evolution of SARS-CoV-2, we, as a community, will have to keep wearing masks and practicing social distance even after we get vaccinated. The longer the virus is floating around and infecting hosts, the riskier our situation will be. The fierce race between human and virus has begun and everyone can make a difference!