The Creation, Manufacture and Distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine

T HE D OLPHIN

The Creation, Manufacture and Distribution of the COVID-19 Vaccine

Adam Barret-James

New House U6th Form

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, there has been a race to develop a safe and effective vaccine against the virus. It was evident that a post COVID-19 world would involve a mass immunization programme, however, vaccine development is an arduous process, which typically takes between 10 and 15 years. Despite this, within a year, the UK had approved different vaccines for use on the public in the mass vaccination programme. There are multiple main vaccines being used in the UK with many other vaccines also being approved for distribution. The main two being used are Pfizer-BioNTech (Pfizer) and Oxford UniversityAstraZeneca (Oxford-AstraZeneca). Despite both being vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, they are different in the way they are created.

There is a big misconception that work on the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine started when the pandemic began, however, this is not the case. Since the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, a plan was created for how to tackle the next big outbreak. At the end of a list of known threats was “Disease X” - the sinister name of a new, unknown infection that would take the world by surprise. The central piece of the plan was a revolutionary style of vaccine known as “plug and play”. Conventional vaccines use a dead or weakened form of the original infection, or inject fragments of it into the body, but these are slow to develop. Instead, Oxford researchers constructed a building block for any vaccine, called ChAdOx1. This was created by taking a common cold virus found in chimpanzees and engineering it to become the building block of a vaccine against almost anything. When the full genetic code of the coronavirus was published on 11th January 2020, Oxford scientists could insert the genetic code for the spike protein into ChAdOx1, and a COVID-19 vaccine had been created.

Pfizer involves using an RNA template for COVID-19 which allows mRNA to be created and inserted into the vaccine. The mRNA codes for the spike protein of the virus, which contains the antigen: this is a protein that distinguishes the virus from other cells.

Due to the high global demand of COVID-19 vaccines, it is essential that the vaccines must be manufactured on a mass scale to provide for countries’ demand. The Pfizer vaccine involves the linking on RNA nucleotides together using a template strand of RNA, with this reaction being catalysed by specific enzymes which are made in bacteria and the free RNA nucleotides being made artificially. The mRNA strand which is created by the free RNA nucleotides is then encapsulated into lipid spheres, these mRNA containing lipid microspheres are the vehicle through which the mRNA enters the cell to be translated and express the Spike protein on the cell surface. The Oxford-