Who is running faster, the virus or the vaccine?
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EDITORIAL
Who is running faster, the virus or the vaccine? Han Dai1 · Jie Han1 · Eric Lichtfouse2,3 Published online: 15 October 2020 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Vaccinating the world population against the COVID-19 faces both classical challenges such as vaccine transport and new challenges such as public trust. Here, we detail issues and potential solutions that will require a world collaboration of public authorities, industries and scientists from both physical and social sciences.
Lab‑to‑jab As the global coronavirus pandemic progresses into the tenth month, vaccination, one of the most important public health interventions invented by Dr. Edward Jenner (1749-1823) and pioneered by Professor Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), is once again coming under the spotlight (Fujiwara and Quinn 2020; Hanson et al. 2017; Hasselgren 2020 https://en.wikip edia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur). While progress on vaccine development has been achieved at an unprecedented speed, safety, efficacy, production capacity and universal accessibility of vaccines are major challenges in the forthcoming labto-jab process (Callaway 2020; Wang et al. 2020a) (Fig. 1). In particular, transport and storage of vaccines present a significant obstacle, especially in developing countries and remote areas (Kartoglu et al. 2020). Who is running faster— the virus or the vaccine—will not only depend on when the vaccines become available but where and how we vaccinate a global population in a safe and most efficient manner. Even when the vaccine becomes available, the average public acceptance to take the COVID vaccine still amounts to only * Jie Han [email protected] 1
Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, Shaanxi, People’s Republic of China
2
CNRS, IRD, INRAE, Coll France, CEREGE, Aix-Marseille University, 13100 Aix en Provence, France
3
State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, Shaanxi, People’s Republic of China
67% in the USA (Malik et al. 2020). Therefore, scientists and public health authorities ought to pursue innovative and pragmatic solutions in the early planning stage to prepare for the upcoming actions.
Fair priority Countries all around the world have started clinical trials for COVID-19 vaccines (Mahase 2020). To date, there have been more than 200 candidates registered with the World Health Organization (WHO), including nine currently in Phase 3 clinical trials (WHO 2020a). Communities with inadequate healthcare, vulnerable population groups, and areas with community spread of COVID-19 are in most need of vaccines (Singh 2020). While researchers are racing against time, it is of paramount importance to ensure the safety of the vaccines that are about to be used by a significant portion of the global population (Makoni 2020). The WHO reiterated that after passing all safety tests, vaccines would be distributed to both high-income and lowincome countries through the COVAX project, the global vaccine allia
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