There are very limited treatments for viral infections. Antibiotics are based on specific differences between the bacterial cell and the host cell and therefore are ineffective against viruses. Thus, vaccines may offer the best chance against viral infections by preventing infection in the first place. Normally, the development of a new vaccine can take over a year, and often over a decade, however development of the Covid-19 vaccine was part of a broader strategy (Operation Warp Speed) to accelerate development and manufacturing… such as using vaccine platforms developed for other diseases, large scale clinical trials, and simultaneous testing and manufacturing.Address the following:
Describe how vaccines work to provide active immunity.
Briefly describe the stages of vaccine development from pre-clincal testing to clinical trials. No more than 1-2 sentences are necessary to describe each stage (don’t copy and paste huge chunks of information from websites, just briefly summarize the stages in your own words). Feel free to insert an image into your post for a visual.
The Covid-19 vaccine is an mRNA vaccine – what does this mean and how does it stimulate an immune response? (Again, don’t copy and paste paragraphs from websites and instead coherently and concisely summarize how the vaccine works to confer active immunity)
There are various types of vaccines – mRNA, live attenuated, inactivated/killed, subunit/conjugate, and toxoid – pick one type and explain to your classmates what it is and provide an example of an infectious disease to which this type targets.
