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COVID-19 VACCINE

The remedy for a global disaster

Covid-19 pandemic was first  identified in Wuhan, a city in the province of Hubei, in China, in december of the year 2019. Since then, the virus has continued spreading thoughout the world. The sickness has killed more than 1.5 million people all over the world. It was considered as a pandemic in march of 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO), one of the organisms inside the United Nations.

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Since then, Intensive Care Units in hospitals around the Globe have been working to their limits, even exceeding them and not being able to take care of all the sick people. At the same time, the goal of pharmaceutical companies has been to come up with a solution. A vaccine. Many governments, United Nations and other organism have inverted money and resources to help develop the investigation. In a normal situation, a vaccine would have taken more than a year to be developed. The covid-19 vaccine has needed nearly eight months, what, indeed, makes some people mistrust on it.

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Doctors working inside a intensive care unit with a Covid-19 patient (Source: elmundo.es ).

A vaccine needs different phases and proofs before it is accepted as valid to cure or prevent a sickness:

  • Phase 1: the vaccine is administered to a little group of voluntary adults for the first time, more or less between 10 and 50 people. The purpose is to know the level of security of the dosis, and thus, of the vaccine.

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  • Phase 2: the vaccine is administered to a major group of people, between 100 and 300. The aim is to analise the most frequent secondary effects, short term as well as long term ones. It is also used to establish the amount of the dosis and the way of vaccinating.

  • Phase 3: the vaccine is administrered to thousands of people. Its evolution and the immune response of people is compared with the people who were not vaccinated (called 'control group'), evaluating the efficiency of the vaccine. A tracing of any secondary effect in the vaccinated people is also done.

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  • Phase 4: the vaccine continues to be evaluated after its comercialization. The aim of this phase is to continue collecting information to enforce its security and efficiency, with a bigger amount of people. In this phase, unknown secondary effects can appear, because they are less frequent and appear between a bigger amount of people.

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Source: Northern Information

PFIZER

Pfizer is the leader company in biomedicine all over the world. Their commitment is, as they affirm on their website, clear: "breakthroughs that change patients’ lives". They work to discover new vaccines and treatments to illneses, no matter where they are discovered. It's from the United States, based on New York City. It was founded in 1849.

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The 'Tozinameran' (BNT162b2) is the vaccine this company has created to prevent Covid-19 contagion. This has been developed in cooperation with BioNTech, a German company in charge of developing active immunotherapies. It has been proved on its fourth phase that its efficiency is bigger than the 90%, and it is said that the vaccine was developed in less than a week before it started to be analized in the different phases.
 

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Source: Pfizer

The vaccine needs to be given in two dosis, with 21 days between each other. However, not everyone wants to have it. There is a large amount of people, apart from vaccine deniers, that mistrust on it. Many authorities ask themselves why this happens. The vaccine has been developed quicker than anyone could expect, and this makes people wonder if it's secure enough.

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Samantha Vanderslott, a researcher in the Oxford University, explains this: "Some people may ask themselves if the speed in approving the vaccine means that phases on its creation have been omited. But it's important to take into account that researches that were being carried out since SARS and MERS epidemics have contributed on this. Furthermore, we have had more resources, more founding and more governments' and pharmaceutical companies' support due to the pandemic.

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Covid-19 vaccines arriving Madrid airport on final days of December 2020 (Source: elmundo.es).

VACCINE IN SPAIN

The 23rd of December, the European Comission approved the comercialization of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine inside the European Union, establishing that the vaccination would start between the 27th and 28th of December in every european country. In Spain, the frist person to be vaccinated was Araceli, a 96 year old women from Guadalajara. The nursing home in which she lives was the first one to receive vacccines the last 27th of December, day in which vaccination started in Spain. From now on, the government's plan to vaccinate Spanish inhabitants is to, first to all, treatr the population in danger for any reason.

The process in Spain is divided in three stages, yet only the firs one has been detailed:

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  • On this first stage, nurses and elderly people in nursing homes, disabled people, hospital doctors and the rest of them will be vaccinated, as well as all those disabled people who need intensive cares. In march, the availability of vaccines will grow, as the english vaccine is expected to be approved by the Comission of the European Union for its comercialization in all the european countries. Until then, the Government wil continue setting the requirements needed for the next two stages of vaccination.

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