Health Information During a Time of Stress

Today's blog is a follow-up to last week's second part blog about "On Our Way to a Vaccine," which is based upon an article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  [ Entitled: "The Development of a Vaccine for COVID-19," June 14, 2020, Page 36-43, 56. ] How Do We Test Susan R. Weiss says, "With  COVID-19, there's currently a hamster model that looks like it works pretty well to mimic the disease and also some promising research with mice, ferrets and also nonhuman primates." The model has importance in terms of replicating mammalian sysmptoms. Siddhartha Mukerjee worked on two separate studies regarding vaccine development: He said, "There are two key scientific questions related to animal vaccine development:" If we are exposed to the virus and live, will we have lifelong immunity? Which vaccines out of a number of suggested ones will be the ones to focus on (1) _____________________________________ In the first study , nine monkies ...

Today's blog is a follow-up to last week's first part blog about "On Our Way to a Vaccine, which is based upon an excellent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.  [ Entitled: "The Development of a Vaccine for COVID-19," June 14, 2020, Page 36-43, 56. ] So, from where we left off last week   - - - Dan Barouch says, "That still leaves the question as to how to get that [aforementioned ] gene into human cells." (1)  He suggests that one way to do this is a vector-based vaccine.  "A vector-based vaccine uses a delivery vehicle  --- one example would be a combined adenovirus, or a "harmless virus" carrier, like a common cold --- to deliver the protein into a person's cells." George Yancopoulos says, "This gene-based approach was used in the case of Ebola.  (2) " But Siddhartha Mukherjee further says, "There is also the idea of further ditching  "harmless virus" carrier (sic) altogether and just using ...

💥  💥  💥  💥  💥  ---  The next series of blogs that I will be writing about is going to be about the process that science has to go through to create a vaccine for a virus or a bacterium. Because it is pretty complicated, I am going to break it down into four separate blogs. Most of the information that this series is based upon comes from an excellent article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.                              [ From an article entitled: "The Development of a Vaccine for COVID-19," June 14, 2020, Page 36-43, 56. ] The fact that the press, experts, epidemiologists, etc. are saying that the biogen field is going to find a vaccine for COVID-19 in 12-18 months is pretty out there. "The first cases of AIDS were described in the early 1980's; it took more than a decade to develop and validate the highly effective triple cocktails that are now the mainstay of therapy." ...