When will we have a coronavirus vaccine?

There is a race that has nothing to do with the Olympic Games even if every country in the world is involved in it right now: it is the race to get a vaccine against the new coronavirus, causing covid-19 pneumonia. A disease for which, at the moment, it seems that we have few weapons: washing our hands often (with soap or with shower gel, it doesn't matter) and lock ourselves up at home to protect the weakest.

At the moment, in that race China and USA seem to be ahead. The Asian country, which has been dealing with the virus the longest, has announced through its Ministry of Defense that China has "successfully" developed a vaccine and has already authorized human testingAlthough in their statement they do not specify when or how these trials will begin. In fact, this is not the only vaccine that Chinese researchers are working on: different organisms have announced throughout the week that up to three possible vaccines will be tested in April. For its part, the US also announced this week that it was going to start the first human (healthy) trials of a possible vaccine.

In Spain, the greatest Spanish expert in coronavirus, the virologist Luis Enjuanes, from his laboratory at the National Center for Biotechnology (CSIC), is also working against the clock to achieve a vaccine that stops the epidemic. Speaking to Verónica Fuentes of the sinc agency, this expert explains that her team is working on the coronavirus building on previous experiences with similar epidemics (the SARS of 2002 and the MERS of 2012).

The possible Spanish vaccine in which this group of scientists is working is based on a fragment of DNA derived from the virus … But the specialist also warns that things in the palace go slowly: "The deadline for obtaining the first prototype is in the range of about four months. However, from there it will be necessary to apply to obtain the permission and that it can be administered to people, which can take eight to 12 more months "Explains dr. Luis Enjuades.

¿We must live with the coronavirus until any of these vaccines are tested (and shown to work)? Well, it seems that yes. But we have a couple of factors in our favor: the first, the arrival of the heat that is just around the corner (every day that they pass 37 degrees, coronaviruses lose 10 times their infectivity which means that with three days of sun its infection capacity drops a thousand times) and the other is that the strains of this type of virus, due to their own survival, tend to attenuate over time (it is therefore foreseeable what the most aggressive will be extinguished little by little and those that cause less aggressive symptoms will survive).

Even so, it takes patience and trust the researchers' work to deal with this situation. The data that epidemiologists handle at the moment is that the rise in the peak of the contagion wave still will last two to four weeks and in June the virus would be at very low levels. The doctor. Luis Enjuades agrees with these calculations: "I consider it a reasonable forecast, now we are all very alarmed, but epidemics usually come and go, and this one is not going to be an exception"