What are the Stages of COVID-19 Vaccine?

 

What are the Stages of COVID-19 Vaccine?

The coronavirus, commonly known as COVID-19, began in Wuhan in 2020 and has since spread throughout China and the world.

COVID-19 forces the world to shut down. Cities worldwide are isolating, and the world has experienced an economic slowdown.

Governments and private sectors have funded scientists to develop a vaccine to fight the pandemic.

This article will talk about the development stages of the COVID-19 Vaccine.

The Exploratory Stage
The exploratory stage is the first step, in which natural antigens that may prevent sickness are discovered in a laboratory

Note! This stage paves the for COVID-19 testing.

Pre-clinical Stages of Development
Next, tissue culture and animal testing are conducted to assess the vaccine's safety and capacity to trigger an immune response.

Researchers may do the following at this stage:
Examine the potential for a human immune response
Decide on a beginning dosage for clinical trials
Improving the effectiveness of the Candidate vaccine

Clinical Stages of Development.
This is the last stage of vaccine development. Under the Clinical stages of development, a candidate vaccine needs to undergo three phases.

Phase 1 Vaccine Trial
The first phase human trials typically have a small sample size of 20 to 80 people.

Researchers may learn whether a study subject received a vaccine or a placebo during this phase.

The key objectives in this phase are to examine the vaccine's safety and assess the immunological response severity.

Phase 2 Vaccine Trial
The second Phase trial has a larger sample size, generally several hundred people, and they frequently include the target population.

These trials are randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled investigations with a placebo group.

Unlike the first trial, the FDA set the following main objective of the second phase: 

• Safety
• Immunogenicity and effectiveness
• Proposed Dosage
• Immunisation schedule
• Method of distribution

Phase 3 Vaccine Trial
In this phase, scientists evaluate vaccination safety in a wide group of people, keeping an eye out for uncommon adverse effects that would not show up in a smaller sample size.

The main objective of the third phase is to test the efficacy of the vaccine candidate and how it responds to COVID-19.

The Effects of Vaccine rollout
After releasing the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine last December 11, 2020, our lives are slowly transitioning to the new normal.

Countries are now opening up their borders. Take the United Kingdom, for example. They now allow their citizens to travel abroad.

However, there are mandatory requirements before received a fit-to-flight certificate for travel.

One of which is that you need to take the PCR Swab test in the UK to be eligible to travel abroad. Once you take the Covid-19 PCR test, you are allowed to go to other countries.