Investment has gone into better and faster vaccine manufacturing technologies. Technology has moved from a slow and unreliable method where the vaccine was grown in eggs, but since 2009, to better and faster technologies. One grows the vaccine in mammalian cells and the second uses recombinant molecular biology techniques, inserting the hemagglutinin antigen into an entirely unrelated virus, then grows that virus in insect cells.
Even under a best-case scenario, using new ideas, it will still take months to deliver large quantities of vaccine. Furthermore, much of the US vaccine supply comes from outside the country. In a lethal pandemic, would a foreign government allow its export before protecting its own population?
Several anti-viral drugs (oseltamivir and zanamivir) can help to lessen the severity of an attack, but there are signs of resistance developing.
What else can be done? In the past several years governments have looked at NPIs – ways to mitigate the pandemics impact using public health measures. No easy answers exist.
The virus is airborne, it is primarily inhaled, but it can also survive or most surfaces for varying periods of time (as we have found this time). The only way to avoid it is to completely isolate oneself from society for the 6 to 10 weeks an outbreak takes to burn itself out. That (Barry says) is unfeasible. So NPIs will have limited usefulness (obviously we’ve gone ahead with these policies during COVID19).
Modelling of the 1918 pandemic suggests that ‘layering’ several interventions – most of them ‘social distancing’ – would stretch out the length of the pandemic and ease the strain on the health care system (Again, we can see the advice here being followed for the current pandemic).
The data for 1918 shows no benefit of quarantine unless strictly enforced. This data was gathered from US army camps of the period.
SEVERAL ANTI-VIRAL DRUGS (OSELTAMIVIR AND ZANAMIVIR) CAN HELP TO LESSEN THE SEVERITY OF AN ATTACK, BUT THERE ARE SIGNS OF RESISTANCE DEVELOPING.
34 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | Q2 Edition
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