As COVID-19 ravages other parts of the world, its variants will continue to evolve and potentially give way to another novel coronavirus. Tweaked vaccines will protect us far better. The mRNA approach will be used to build the new health care weapons and do it at scale. Anti-virals will also be swiftly developed to fight new diseases at the start of symptoms. A current example is Tamiflu – the anti- viral that materially reduces the impact of influenza. Plus, this targeted approach will support all kinds of precision medicine. For example, developing medicine that teaches the body to only attack a certain cancer cell in a specific organ. The swift and high-tech development of the COVID-19 vaccine will pay substantial dividends in future drug development.
The U.S. reported its first COVID-19 cases in January 2020, only to see exploding cases in the coming months. Sandra Lindsay, an ICU nurse in New York City, received the first U.S. vaccine on December 14, 2020. So in less than a year, the virus was identified, a vaccine developed and tested, and the final product administered to the first patient. Regular people like myself began to get vaccinated in March 2021 – a mere 15 months after first cases were reported. The next fastest vaccine to be developed took four years. That is astounding... Plus, all the lessons learned have accelerated vaccine and anti-viral medication development for the future. Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines have shifted into high gear. Until the COVID-19 vaccine, no mRNA vaccines had been approved by the FDA, despite 30-plus years of work on the approach. These mRNA vaccines are different than traditional vaccines. Old vaccines put weakened disease into your body, allowing the immune system to learn it and kill it. But mRNA is different... It sends a “message” to your immune system, turning essentially any immune cell into a vaccine factory. This message tells the body to build a protein that looks like COVID-19 and triggers an immune response... dismantling the virus. The work on this approach over the past year will catapult new vaccine development for the next pandemic. Because, make no mistake, more pandemics are coming.
PREDICTIVE MODELING SUPPORTED HOSPITALS
Overall, the U.S. health care system was woefully unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic. This was especially true for hospitals, where a lack of personal protective equipment (“PPE”), ventilators, ICU/ CCU capacity, and exploding labor costs all impacted these crucial organizations. Think about the early days of the outbreak in
American Consequences
39
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online