Progress in key areas of medical research has been accelerated by a factor of 10x during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods of delivering public healthcare have also been transformed by the lessons learned as the world continues to monitor and contain the virus. But this progress has come at a terrible cost.
In a little over two years the COVID-19 global pandemic claimed more than 15 million lives and it’s not yet over. It has been a disaster for people all over the world, for healthcare services, for economies and for society. We will be grieving those we have lost, even while suffering the huge economic and social costs of the global blight, for decades to come. In economic terms the International Monetary Fund estimates that the pandemic has already cost the world economy over 12.5 trillion dollars.
The pandemic sparked an unprecedented research drive in an attempt to control a rapidly spreading disease that was so lethal and contagious it led to a near global shutdown. Nation after nation closed its borders and vast sums of public and private money were pumped into research at unprecedented speed (and within a startlingly short space of time). It’s not something that the normally cautious medical world would have wished for, but the significant medical developments of the past two-and-a-half years would not have happened without the arrival of COVID-19. The pathogen served as a powerful catalyst, ushering in new technologies, data and research that are now offering insights into many other diseases. COVID-19 has turned out to be the mother of medical innovation.
The lessons that have been learned – and the new research norms that have solidified – are transforming medical science. The billions of dollars, euros, yen, etc. invested in COVID-19 vaccines and related research are now expected to yield medical and scientific dividends that will continue to deliver benefits for decades. The world sits on the verge of a number of potentially significant breakthroughs, mostly thanks to the ongoing research into hi-tech, gene-based vaccines, which could now benefit patients with cancer, heart disease as well as a whole raft of infectious diseases.
Meanwhile, new studies into long COVID-19 could shine a light into blood clotting, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and other conditions that have been closely associated with the virus. Obesity and vitamin levels are also under the microscope, while telemedicine, digital medicine (HealthTech) and increased collaboration between healthcare-providers are already reshaping how public healthcare is delivered.
In the last two years the most significant advance in medical science triggered by the arrival of COVID has been the rapid application, development and deployment of genetic mRNA technologies, initially to produce highly effective anti-COVID vaccines at a speed that was previously considered impossible.
Messenger ribonucleic acid (abbreviated as mRNA) is a type of single-stranded RNA involved in protein synthesis. mRNA is made from a DNA template during the process of transcription (the process by which the information in a strand of DNA is copied into a new molecule of messenger RNA).
The vaccines created by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna in less than one year employ such mRNA technologies to fight COVID-19. When these genetically engineered COVID vaccines were being tested, it was the first time mRNA therapies had been trialled on humans in vaccine technology. While the concept is new to the public, mRNA research had been around since the early 1990s.
Traditional vaccines train the immune system by introducing it to harmless versions of whole viruses - the body learns to recognize the virus’s key features, such as SARS-CoV-2’s infamous spike protein. Normally, such vaccine development for a new virus takes between ten and fifteen years. These new mRNA vaccines provided a more elegant way to achieve the same goal in less than a year. Using messenger RNA - a genetic molecule found throughout nature that’s used to transmit information within and between cells - the new mRNA vaccines now provide the body with a set of instructions on how to make the spike protein itself, essentially borrowing the body’s internal machinery and turning it into a photocopier.
A second new technology was used to produce COVID-19 vaccines at high speed. Oxford University in the UK worked with pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca to produce a highly effective “vector vaccine”. In this type of vaccine, genetic material from the COVID-19 virus is placed inside a modified version of a different virus (on the same viral vector). Viral vector vaccines can't cause the recipient to become infected with the COVID-19 virus or the viral vector virus. An alternative vector vaccine was also produced by Janssen/Johnson & Johnson.
Over a year into the biggest vaccination campaign in history, more than 11.9 billion doses have been administered across 184 countries, according to data collected by Bloomberg. The latest rate was roughly 20.8 million doses a day.
Never before has mass immunisation been carried out so rapidly and on such a gigantic scale.
It is estimated that this astonishingly rapid development and deployment of vaccines has saved at least 750,000 lives in the United States and Europe alone — and many more globally, although reliable data is not yet available from many parts of the world. A study by the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control published in December 2021 estimated that 470,000 deaths had been averted across 33 European countries in those aged 60 and over.
