How the development of the coronavirus vaccine compares with other hits in history

• Vaccine research and development has improved dramatically throughout history.
• Almost 200 years have passed between the creation of the first successful vaccine and the eventual eradication of smallpox.
• The flu virus was isolated in a laboratory in 1933, and the first flu vaccine was not authorized until 1945.
• Research on the coronavirus vaccine began a few months after the first COVID-19 case was observed and has progressed at a rapid pace.
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Research to develop a vaccine for the novel coronavirus has been going on at a historically rapid pace, with clinical trials starting just months after the first case was identified.

The rollout for high-risk groups could begin as early as December 2020, though the vaccine won’t be widely available until spring or summer 2021.

By comparison, the flu virus was first isolated in a laboratory in 1933, and an effective flu vaccine was not licensed until 1945. Many technological advances, such as the invention of the bifurcated (two-pronged) needle. for more efficient vaccine delivery in 1965, they improved vaccines from the earliest days of research.

Business Insider compiled the timeline for vaccine development throughout history, from polio to swine flu, to demonstrate how the pace of research has evolved.

Yuqing Liu / Business Insider

The first vaccine was created in the 1700s

In 1796, British physician Edward Jenner successfully tested the first smallpox vaccine by injecting a young boy with a milder, smallpox-like disease that typically affected cows. He wrote to the Royal Society of Medicine detailing his experiment, but they rejected his article.

Jenner tested the vaccine on 22 other patients and published his results in a pamphlet in 1798, which was met with mixed reviews. But news of the vaccine spread quickly after another doctor, Henry Cline, successfully replicated Jenner’s results.

At the time, there was no advisory committee to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine, so Jenner was free to provide the vaccine to anyone who requested it. The vaccine material reached most European countries in the 1800s and in 1802 Dr Benjamin Waterhouse performed a public vaccination test in Boston. The city board sponsored the trial and 19 volunteers were successfully vaccinated.

Smallpox became the first infectious disease to be completely eradicated from a vaccine in 1980, following advances in needle technology and a push for mass vaccinations by the World Health Organization.

This centuries-old effort has paved the way for many more vaccines to come and many more public health successes that have led to current efforts to quell the coronavirus pandemic.

Polio

Scientists began studying polio immunity at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in the early 20th century. In 1910, Simon Flexner saw that the monkeys who survived polio had developed antibodies.

However, the first two polio vaccine studies in humans in 1935 had disastrous results. The trials involved a combined total of approximately 21,000 children. Many of them died of polio and many others were paralyzed or had allergic reactions.

Nearly two decades later, in 1952, Jonas Salk developed a vaccine based on the killed polio virus. His first test results confirmed that the vaccine triggered the production of antibodies. But in interviews Salk warned that it would take time for larger tests to prove safety and efficacy. He even went on the radio to talk about overly optimistic media reports.

In 1955, Salk’s polio vaccine was found to be 80-90% effective in a randomized double-blind clinical trial involving 1.3 million children. The US government authorized the vaccine, but the Surgeon General suspended implementation when it was discovered that some batches of the vaccine contained live polio virus. Over 260 cases of polio have been attributed to vaccines made by Cutter Laboratories, resulting in increased government oversight.

Polio vaccinations resumed in the fall of 1955, and the Pan American Health Organization eventually declared that polio had been eradicated from the Americas in 1994.

Typhus

Several groups were researching a typhoid fever vaccine in the 1890s, and credit for the discovery is shared between Richard Pfeiffer and Wilhelm Kolle in Germany and Almroth Wright in the UK.

Wright tested his vaccine in 1896: first on two Indian medical officers, then on himself and his co-investigator, and finally on 15 British soldiers. After Wright’s vaccine proved effective, it was first distributed to the British Army in 1899. Nearly 15,000 soldiers were immunized, successfully reducing rates of typhoid fever among troops.

The United States Army implemented mandatory vaccinations in 1911 and the typhoid vaccine was made available to the American public in 1914. Nowadays, Americans are advised to only get vaccinated if they travel to an area where the typhus is endemic. Vaccination campaigns are still ongoing in some countries of South Asia and Africa.

Yellow fever

In 1931, Harvard virologist Max Theiler showed that mice injected with serum from previously infected monkeys or humans were protected from yellow fever infection. In 1936 he created the first safe and effective yellow fever vaccine, which he called 17D.

Theiler published the results of his yellow fever vaccine trials in humans in 1937. The vaccine was approved and mass-produced that year, and quickly became the universal standard. Theiler would later win a Nobel Prize for his vaccine research.

Mass vaccination campaigns nearly eradicated the disease from some countries in 1961, but others continued to experience major epidemics. Since the 1990s, there have been several yellow fever epidemics across Africa.

Influence

British scientists Wilson Smith, Christopher Andrewes and Patrick Laidlaw isolated the flu virus in 1933 and began studying antibody production in ferrets.

Jonas Salk and Thomas Francis developed the first influenza A vaccine in 1938. Two years later, Francis discovered influenza B and the duo created a two-component influenza vaccine in 1942.

The combination vaccine was first produced for military use in 1944, and then licensed to civilians in 1945 after testing on military recruits and college students.

But during the 1947 seasonal flu epidemic, researchers realized that new strains of flu appear every year and require separate vaccines. The WHO launched its first Influenza Center in London in 1948 and today centers around the world continue to research new vaccines.

Measles, mumps and rubella

American physician Thomas Peebles first isolated the measles virus in February 1954, during an outbreak at a private school outside Boston. His team tested the first version of the vaccine on 11 children with intellectual and physical disabilities in 1958 and found that the virus in the vaccine was strong enough to give children some adverse symptoms.

After multiple rounds of reformulations and trials in Boston, John Enders finally licensed a vaccine that was safe and effective in preventing measles infections in 1963.

Merck’s Maurice Hilleman developed a more attenuated vaccine in 1968, which he then combined with vaccines for mumps (licensed in 1967) and rubella (1969) to create the MMR vaccine in 1971. The combined vaccine induced the immunity to all three viruses with no major adverse reactions compared to a single vaccine.

The CDC aimed to eliminate measles from the United States with routine vaccinations starting in 1978, achieving success in 2000. However, cases from abroad caused several small outbreaks in the 21st century.

Hepatitis B

Four years after discovering the virus, American physician and geneticist Baruch Blumberg developed the first hepatitis B vaccine in 1969 using an antigen he found in Australia. He later won a Nobel Prize for his research.

In 1981, the FDA approved a more sophisticated vaccine derived from the blood of hepatitis B positive donors, but it was discontinued in 1990 due to fears surrounding the AIDS epidemic.

Researchers developed a genetically modified DNA-based vaccine in 1986. This vaccine, which is still used today, contains no blood products and cannot make people with hepatitis B sick.

Chickenpox

In 1974, Michiaki Takahashi isolated the “Oka” strain of chickenpox, or chicken pox, from a three-year-old boy in Japan. In the same year he developed a live attenuated chickenpox vaccine and tested it on 23 children in the hospital. All the children who received the vaccine developed antibodies and did not get sick despite an outbreak in their ward.

Clinical trials continued in Japan until 1986, when the vaccine was approved and launched for voluntary use.

The chickenpox vaccine was authorized in the United States in 1995 and added to the children’s vaccination program, making the United States the first country to introduce routine chickenpox vaccination for young children.

Swine flu

The first human infection with the new H1N1 influenza A virus was detected on April 15, 2009. The US CDC publicly reported the first two cases and announced that vaccine research was underway on April 21.

Clinical trials testing candidates for the H1N1 flu vaccine officially began on July 22. The FDA approved four vaccines on September 15.

The United States ordered the first vaccine two weeks later, and the US national H1N1 flu vaccination campaign was officially launched in October. However, there were initial vaccine shortages and the vaccine was not widely available until December. Long-term safety studies of the vaccine continued to publish the results until the end of the year.

COVID-19

Reports of a mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China reached WHO in early December 2019. It was discovered that the disease, now known as COVID-19, was a disease caused by a new coronavirus, nicknamed SARS-CoV-2, Chinese authorities reported on January 7.

On March 16, 2020, five days after WHO declared a pandemic, Moderna was the first company to begin testing the safety of the coronavirus vaccine. Several other companies started their own studies shortly after, and there will likely be more than 50 coronavirus vaccine candidates in human testing by the end of the year.

Both Moderna and Pfizer announced positive preliminary results of their tests in November. Once the safety data is completed, they will request authorization for emergency use from the FDA.

If one or both candidates are approved, the rollout will likely begin in the last days of 2020 or early 2021. Frontline workers and vulnerable populations will be eligible for vaccinations sooner and the general public will likely have to wait until summer before a vaccine is available. widely available.