The world now has a new COVID-19 vaccine, and the cost per dose is only a fraction of the cost. In the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 314 million people have been infected and more than 5.5 million people have died worldwide. About 60% of the world's population has received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. But there are still obvious and shocking gaps in accessing these vaccines worldwide.
Virologist Maureen Ferran, who closely monitors the pandemic, believes that the inequality of the vaccine should cause serious concern to everyone.
If the world has learned anything from this pandemic, it is that the virus does not require a passport. However, in high-income and middle-high-income countries, about 77% of people received at least one dose of the vaccine, compared with only 10% in low-income countries. Wealthy countries are offering booster shots, even a fourth dose, and many people around the world are unable to get the first and second doses.
But hopefully, a new vaccine called CORBEVAX will help close this vaccination gap. How does the
CORBEVAX vaccine work?
All COVID-19 vaccines teach the immune system how to recognize the virus and prepare the body for attack. The CORBEVAX vaccine is a protein subunit vaccine. It uses the harmless portion of the spike protein that causes COVID-19 in the new coronavirus to stimulate and prepare the immune system for future encounters with the virus.
is different from the three vaccines approved by the United States - Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA vaccines and Johnson & Johnson 's viral vector vaccines - these three vaccines provide the body with instructions on how to produce spike proteins, CORBEVAX directly sends spike proteins to the body. Like other approved COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, CORBEVAX also requires two doses. How is
CORBEVAX developed?
CORBEVAX was developed by Maria Elena Bottazzi and Dr. Peter Hotelz, co-director of the Vaccine Development Center of Texas Children's Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine.
During the SARS outbreak in 2003, the researchers created a similar vaccine by inserting genetic information from a portion of the SARS virus spike protein into yeast to produce a large amount of protein. After the viral spike protein is isolated from the yeast and the adjuvant is added, the vaccine is ready for use.
The first SARS epidemic was short-lived, with no need for vaccines from Bottazzi and Hotelz – until the virus that causes COVID-19 SARS-CoV-2 appeared in 2019. So they dusted off their vaccine and updated the spike protein to match it with SARS-CoV-2, which in turn created the CORBEVAX vaccine.
A large-scale clinical trial based in the United States found that the vaccine is safe and tolerant, and has an effect on preventing asymptomatic infections of more than 90%. The vaccine has obtained emergency use authorization in India, and other developing countries, , are expected to follow up.
Interestingly, the research team at Baylor University failed to gain interest or funding for their vaccines in the United States. Although Bottazzi and Hotelz's vaccine design is more advanced - thanks to their previous work during the 2003 SARS and 2012 MERS outbreak, newer technologies such as mRNA vaccines have developed rapidly.
vaccine created for the world
Since protein subunit vaccines can be produced at any time using mature recombinant DNA technology, this technology is relatively cheap and quite easy to scale up, so it has an advantage over mRNA vaccines. Similar protein recombination technologies, which are 40 years old, have been used in the Novavax COVID-19 vaccine, which can be used and recombined with the hepatitis B vaccine in 170 countries.
This vaccine can be produced on a larger scale because there are already appropriate production facilities. The key to global use is that CORBEVAX can be stored in ordinary refrigerators. Therefore, it is possible to quickly produce millions of doses of vaccines and distribute them relatively easily. In contrast, producing mRNA vaccines is more expensive and complex because they are based on newer technologies, rely on highly skilled workers and often require ultra-low temperatures for storage and transportation.
Another major difference is that the development of the CORBEVAX vaccine takes into account the use of vaccines worldwide. Their goal is to use a tested safe method to create a low-cost, easy to produce and transport vaccine. The key is that researchers do not care about intellectual property or economic interests.The vaccine is produced without a lot of public funds, and the $7 million required for development is provided by philanthropists.
OBREVAX is currently patent-free license to India's largest vaccine manufacturer Biological E. Limited (BioE), which plans to produce at least 100 million doses per month starting from February 2022. This patent-free arrangement means that other low- and middle-income countries can produce and distribute the cheap, stable and relatively easy-to-scale vaccines locally.
Overall, this means that CORBEVAX is one of the cheapest vaccines at present. How it works for the Omickron variant is under investigation. However, the story of CORBEVAX can serve as a model and address the issue of vaccine inequality when it is necessary to vaccinate the world’s population.
The necessity of fair vaccine
Global vaccine acquisition is unfair, such as the governments of wealthy countries purchase vaccines in advance, which limits the supply. While developing countries also have vaccine production capacity, low- and middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America still need to be able to pay for orders.
The Indian government has ordered 300 million doses of CORBEVAX, and BioE plans to produce more than 1 billion shots for people in developing countries. As a background, the United States and the other G7 have committed to donating more than 1.3 billion doses of COVID vaccine, but only 591 million doses have been shipped. These figures mean that if BioE can produce 1.3 billion doses of CORBEVAX as planned, the vaccine will cover more people than the vaccine donated and shipped by the richest countries.
As the Omickron variant shows, the new variant can spread rapidly around the world and is more likely to develop among unvaccinated populations, continuing to emerge as long as the global vaccination rate remains low. Strengthening needles are unlikely to end the pandemic. Instead, developing a globally universal vaccine like CORBEVAX is an important first step in vaccinating the world and ending the pandemic.
