Vaccines for the Win!

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and its full impact was experienced worldwide in terms of loss of lives and livelihoods, I had a naïve expectation. I reasoned that now that the American people got to see the sorry state of the world as a result of the absence of ONE vaccine, they would fully realize the lunacy of the antivaxxer movement that wants a world with NO vaccines. And when the COVID-19 vaccines were produced in record time and became available, I fully expected the American people to flock in droves to get vaccinated and protect their lives and those of their loved ones and friends. Alas, although a majority of Americans received the vaccine and the boosters, a substantial number refused. Not only that, but the antivaccination movement had a resurgence and effectively spread alarmist misinformation and conspiracies about the vaccines far and wide promoting vaccine hesitancy, which hurt and killed many people.
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The antivaccination movement, which before the pandemic was mostly a movement among people with left-wing ideology concerned about vaccine safety and effectiveness, expanded during the pandemic into right wing groups rallying around ideas of parental rights and freedom from the imposition of government vaccination, which in turn gained a measure of backing from politicians eager to capitalize on their support. This activism also produced a campaign of harassment of health professionals and scientists promoting and dispensing vaccines. After the pandemic, the antivaccine groups have remained active by organizing and trying to influence vaccination policies such as school vaccination requirements in several states.
 
Regardless of the above, the COVID-19 vaccines performed admirably. The vaccines saved more than 20 million lives worldwide the first year they were introduced, and in the United States they prevented three million deaths. During the height of the pandemic, unvaccinated people were 10 times more likely to be hospitalized and 11 times more likely to die than vaccinated people. As it was during president’s Donald Trump tenure that the Covid-19 vaccines were developed, it is ironic that Republican voters had a higher proportion of deaths than Democratic voters because of their reticence or outright refusal to receive the vaccine. Many notorious vaccine deniers including talk show hosts and social media influencers died as a result of Covid-19. In a move reminiscent of the well-known Darwin Awards, a subreddit forum created the Herman Cain Award, which is bestowed upon people who publicly declare their opposition to the COVID-19 vaccines and then die of the disease.
 
Even though many vaccine scientists have been publicly maligned and harassed, they have soldiered on making our world a better place by producing new vaccines, creating better vaccines or vaccination methods, or molding public policy. The rest of this post is a celebration of their achievements.
 
We start with the COVID-19 vaccines which were made possible by decades of research, during which many problems were identified and solved.
The Hungarian-American scientist, Dr. Katalin Karikó, overcame adversity and along with her colleague, American immunologist Drew Wiseman, made key discoveries that allowed mRNA to be stable and not produce an inflammatory response. This in turn made possible the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines. They both shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.
The American immunologist, Barney S. Graham, experienced a life-changing event when two children died in a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine trial in 1967. He spent the rest of his life trying to figure out what happened. Graham discovered that viral proteins change their shape when they interact with the cells they infect, and that the best vaccine is the one that targets the protein in the shape before it interacts with cells. This discovery was instrumental in developing the COVID-19 vaccine, and also allowed the development of effective vaccines against RSV, a disease which can be lethal for infants and older people. Dr. Graham and his collaborators received the 2020 Golden Goose Award, which recognizes federally-funded basic research that leads to discoveries with significant impact on humanity.
 
Now we move on to the remarkable case of the prevention of a cancer by a vaccine! In the 1980s it was discovered that some types of human papilloma virus (HPV) could cause cervical cancer. Several researchers, among them American immunologists Doug Lowy and John Schiller, and Australian Immunologist Ian Frazer, took up the study of the genes and proteins in HPV that were responsible for making human cells cancerous. They discovered that when several copies of an HPV viral protein are mixed together, they assemble into a virus-like-particle that can elicit a strong immune response. This approach was then employed by pharmaceutical companies to produce vaccines that are effective against the virus and which have been found to significantly reduce the risk of cervical cancer in women, anal cancer in men, and genital warts in both sexes. Lowy and Schiller received the prestigious Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award for this achievement, and Frazer received the Prime Minister's Prize for Science in 2008 and was voted a “National Living Treasure” in 2012 by the National Trust of Australia.
 
Finally, there is malaria, which kills more than 500,000 people (80% children under 5) each year, and which is a fiendishly complicated disease to tackle due to the many stages of development that its parasite goes though, and its capacity to evade the human immune system. However, after more than 60 years of research and trials by many scientists and clinicians, the first malaria vaccine was approved for use by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2021 and another vaccine two years later. In clinical trials, the vaccines reduced the number of cases of malaria and mortality, and their evaluation is ongoing.
 
Vaccines are a success story and a tangible example of what science has done for us. Vaccines have decreased infant mortality in the world by 40% in the last 50 years, and the future of vaccines with new technologies to develop more effective vaccines seems promising. In the meantime, antivaxxers are causing real harm by promoting vaccine hesitancy. The obstacle to greatly diminishing the burden of disease on humanity is not lack of tools anymore, but overcoming misinformation.
 
The photo of the COVID-19 vaccine by Lisa Ferdinando (DOD) was taken from the Flickr photostream of the US Secretary of Defense and is used here under an Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.