Scientists are in a race against time to beat coronavirus now rampaging all across the world. As the death toll is about to reach the 0.2 million mark, therapeutic remedy by existing drugs has not been quite effective. Hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine used for treatment of malaria and certain type of inflammation were thought to produce a positive result on some Covid-19 patients. Favipiravir, developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm of Japan, was hailed for sometime as a cure for the disease. Beximco and Beacon, two local pharmaceuticals, also started producing favipiravir under licence from the Japanese company.
Whether these anti-viral drugs are used for treatment of the exponential severe cases of coronavirus infection in Bangladesh or other countries and with what recovery rate is hardly known. President Trump of the United States of America, however, issued once an indirect threat to India over the latter's reluctance to export hydroxychloroquine to the US as desired by him. The death toll in the US does not in any way show that available therapeutic care has been on the higher side. In India medical scientists are upbeat about the success of plasma treatment. But it was the Chinese who first successfully employed the method of anti-body formation from the blood of patients who have recovered from the disease.
What is clear from the sway of the pandemic is that scientists, highly reputed laboratories and pharmaceutical companies in the advanced countries are more interested in finding an answer to the disease's preventive measure. One of the reasons for this is the assumption that the flu-like disease will automatically die its natural death like its predecessor such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) or the earlier Spanish flu.
So, billions of dollars are being poured into research and experiment of vaccines that might give people the immunity against the disease. However, there are epidemiologists, medical scientists who have come forward to team up to find out an inoculation against coronavirus with modest funds. A kind of competition is going on for invention of a most effective vaccine against Covid-19.
Of the vaccines developed so far, the most promising seems to be the one developed by a group of scientists at the University of Oxford. They have already performed its trial on humans. A total of 800 volunteers divided in two equal groups have been recruited for the trial. As the test requires, 400 of them will be vaccinated by the serum and another 400 will be given a kind of placebo. They will not receive the shot of the newly invented vaccine but one that works against meningitis.
In the USA, a small biotech firm Moderna was the first to launch a vaccine trial in humans. But before the results of a safety study on only 105 volunteers could be obtained, it is reported to go for large-scale production of the vaccines. Interestingly, before it is known for certain if the vaccine will be effective and safe, the US government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Devlopment Authority (BARDA) has already invested $483 for ramping up Moderna's production capacity.
Johnson & Johnson has also announcedan investment of $1.0 billion in the effort. Its subsidiary Janssen Pharmaceuticals hopes to start human trials by September at the latest. The University Pittsburgh Medical Centre (UPMC) and the Pittsburgh School of Medicine have also come up with a potential anti-corona vaccine. Tested on mice, it has produced antibodies specific to SARS Cov-2 or Covid-19 enough to neutralize the virus.
Before any such vaccine proves most suitable, it has to be tested on tens of thousands of people. But the US companies are going for production of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses, obviously, with an eye on capturing the market and monopolise profit. But if the vaccines are not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the enormous sum of money invested in those will go waste.
Yet people the world over will keep their fingers crossed and pray for at least one vaccine that will protect humans against this highly contagious disease. Much as the rush may be, no vaccine can receive a green signal for mass application before September next. It will take further time to reach countries like Bangladesh. Not a rosy prospect! The only hope is that by this time the scourge of the virus may take leave on its own.