Freedom from the crown (the coronavirus)

By  Noralyn Onto Dudt

A year has passed since most of the world populace was told to stay in place; to stay put or they may end up "killing" each other. A year of uncertainty, a year of wearing masks, a year of physical distancing, a year of not visiting parents, grandparents and friends. A year of no touching and no hugging each other. It has been a year that had almost all of us gripped with fear as we watched others become critically ill and were rushed to fill hospital beds. As the kings and queens of centuries past, with their "coronas" (crowns) on their heads, wielding power that put fear into their subjects’ hearts, the coronavirus has been wielding its power and our hearts have been terrified.  And with this fear gripping us, the way we carry on with our lives has been changed forever.

As the virus was proving to be so deadly and with so many people dying, businesses collapsing, and people losing their jobs, the government of the United States went into high gear a year ago, and put "Operation Warp Speed" in place.

Operation Warp Speed is a public-private partnership which aimed to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing and distribution of the vaccine.  The US government provided US$18 billion, a very high sum indeed, to develop a vaccine that would protect us and free us from the clutches of the virus. The coronavirus is only 70-90 nm in size, invisible to the naked eye, but has the potency to wreak havoc everywhere.  The vaccine had to be one like no other before because the corona is a novel virus. Novel viruses come from animals and humans have no immunity to them because the RNA sequencing of the gene inside the virus is not human. Thus, the human immune system does not recognize it.

On the other hand, the seasonal flu is a human virus and its DNA/RNA chains are recognized by the human immune system.  It means that the body has the ability to develop its immunity each time the virus comes around.  Not so with the corona. It is a bug that our bodies have never seen nor fought before. And this virus is particularly evil. It manipulates the immune response in such a way that it creates dysfunction in our bodily organs that even if we survive, it could impair us for life.

The development of a drug or a vaccine usually takes three to six years because it involves four phases of clinical trials that focus on safety and efficacy (effectiveness). Clinical trials are usually conducted with healthy volunteers.  With the coronavirus wreaking havoc all over the world's population, speed was essential but great care had to be taken to avoid sacrificing safety and efficacy.  Research scientists worked around the clock, pored over data of old experiments to glean useful information. And thanks to decades of RNA and mRNA meticulous research, a vaccine was developed.

BioNTech of Germany and Pfizer of the United States came up with a vaccine that does not contain the coronavirus itself, but rather a synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) that instructs cells to manufacture a protein that looks like the spike protein of the coronavirus.  The immune system, in turn, responds by producing antibodies to that protein, creating sentries (guards) against infection by the real virus.  And have no fear, the RNA does not interfere or alter a person's DNA.

The intent of all vaccines is to mimic a real infection, allowing the immune system to develop a response that establishes "memory" should the host later become exposed to the actual infection.

The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines would inject the genetic code of a part of SARS-COV-2 into a person muscle tissue.  That code uses the muscle cells as a factory to produce the coronavirus protein at the site of the injection.  The vaccine functions as a spy of sorts, showing the body's immune system cells what the protein looks like so they would be prepared to fight should the vaccinated person ever encounter the virus.

The vaccine is safe; Pfizer had about 50,000 volunteers in its clinical trials and these trials were rigorous and had to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a government agency that is responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products and medical devices.

My husband Philip and I, along with friends in our age group received our second dose of the Pfizer vaccine over three weeks ago. We are fine. We feel "liberated". We look forward to being able to hug our grandchildren again, to have lunch with our friends, to be able to congregate at our church and receive Holy Communion, to be able to travel and see the world. And now we can say a prayer of thanks, as our grandson Louie Samuel Vaughan would say, "GOD is great, GOD is good and we thank HIM that a vaccine is finally within our grasp, a vaccine that can free us from the Corona." Amen to all of you who will be "liberated " by the vaccine.

(Noralyn Onto Dudt is a genuine Ilokana who spent her formative years in Batac, Ilocos Norte, raised by the "village" of the Agbannaoag/Abitong/Onto clans, and in Laoag City mentored by the late Dr. Esperanza Albano-Sales who gave her a sense of what may lie ahead, beyond the vast Pacific Ocean. She lives in a house "within the shadow" of the National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland where her students performed medical research and scientific experiments.)