Covid Vaccine Update & What It Means

Despite COVID-19 being a global virus that has led to a nine-month quarantine in the United States, as well as the majority of the rest of the world, I have been fortunate enough to not know anybody that has caught it, let alone die from it. That is until I started classes again when one of my professors told me that he and his wife caught it and suffer from complete disuse of smell now. For the first part of quarantine, a minor part of me thought that the virus was a hoax, similarly to when Forever 21 went bankrupt and everyone believed they’d be fully shut down in 2019. 

However, a few days ago, that same professor of mine emailed all of his students updating us that there was a vaccine for COVID in progress with hopes of a mass release in late winter. Part of me hopes that it’s true and that I’ll be able to finish my last year in college back on campus with all of my friends. The realistic part of me believes that until I get the vaccine, quarantine will stay in place and I should get comfortable with life as we know it now – in masks and group gatherings of no more than 10 people.

As for the vaccine, the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer released its vaccine update this past Monday stating that so far it is 90% effective. During the current trials, the study has shown that those who take the vaccine will have to take a second dose in injection form approximately two weeks after the first dose.

So what does this mean? It means that the study is still ongoing since the second dose was just administered to those in the trial, and cannot be approved by the FDA FDA for a couple of months to see if the effectiveness has changed. During those months, Pfizer will have to work with government officials and the public health community in order to figure out how to safely store and ship the vaccine to places of administration. It also means that they will need time to train those for administering the vaccine and the safety hazards that come with it. And that’s if the study results are good enough for the FDA to approve.

This news brings a lot of hope, which the world really needs at the moment, but it also brings the fear that the vaccine will not be approved and distributed for quite some time. I think we were all praying that the Coronavirus would be gone by the new year, and unfortunately, it won’t be. I don’t know about anyone else, but sometimes I have a hard time remembering what it was like before the quarantine –  how it was possible for 180,000 people to be crowded at Rolling Loud 2019 or being able to breathe properly at work without a mask.

I keep thinking about how over a million lives were lost due to the Coronavirus and how this vaccine could prevent so many more. However, just as any virus or disease before it, it won’t fix those who have already been affected, and it won’t bring any of those lives back. The Coronavirus will always live in our minds, but once there is an effective vaccine, we will officially be able to say that we have lived through it and persevered. One day, the Coronavirus will just be another event in history that we’ll tell our grandchildren about.

• Coronavirus
• quarantine
• vaccine