: Learning in 2020: What the year taught us about vaccines? #IndiaNEWS #Contributor We all got quite an education in 2020. We started thinking about things that had previously barely crossed our minds.

Learning in 2020: What the year taught us about vaccines? #IndiaNEWS #Contributor
We all got quite an education in 2020. We started thinking about things that had previously barely crossed our minds. And we suddenly learned to value many services and products we used to take for granted. And we were surprised to see events unfold that we had never thought could happen. All these thoughts and experiences gave us a fast track education on everything from the global economy to the power of the human spirit in 2020.

One of the most important subjects we learned about in 2020 was vaccines. How vaccines are developed, tested, produced, transported, and distributed is not usually a dinner table conversation. But as the global COVID-19 pandemic raged on in 2020, vaccines suddenly took center stage because it quickly became apparent that a vaccine would become the answer to this deadly virus.

Here are some of the big points 2020 taught us about vaccines.

How to develop Vaccines fast

Most vaccines take a decade or more from conception to development, to testing, and officially deemed safe to use. Up until the vaccine push of 2020, four years was the fastest a major vaccine was developed. That record was held by the mumps vaccine developed in the 1960s.

With the coronavirus spreading around the world like wildfire in 2020 and the death toll cresting a million, even record time was too long to wait for a vaccine. The vaccine had to be developed fast. What is the best way to get something done fast? By working together.

The mumps virus was basically developed by one man, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, at one pharmaceutical company, Merck. When the group working on a project is small, it is no wonder it takes a long time. To go faster in 2020, companies, governments, and academic institutions partnered up and worked together to make COVID-19 vaccines faster than the world has ever seen.

Several different collaborators went to work on several different types of vaccines to get something to the people as fast as possible. Pfizer partnered with the German biotech company BioNTech, Moderna teamed up with the National Institute of Health, and AstraZeneca got together with the University of Oxford to attempt to produce a vaccine. These are just three of the 60-plus vaccines that have been approved or are in current clinical trials around the world.

Proper Vaccine temperature monitoring is critical

When patients receive a vaccine, the process usually involves a healthcare professional walking into the room with a syringe and injecting it in the arm. What we don’t see are the precise conditions at which that dose of vaccine has to be kept up to the moment that shot is readied for dispatch so the vaccine will be both effective and safe to administer.