If the pandemic had hit in the year 2000 instead of 2020, the race for a vaccine would have looked very different.
"I do not think we would have been able to do that," said Dr. Sergio Urcuyo, chair of the department of hospital medicine at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center on the rapid pace from sequencing the DNA of the virus, to vaccinating patients in less than a year. "This is a miracle of modern science, that we were able to identify this, create something, test it out, prove its safety and efficacy in 11 months. It’s just incredible."
Dr. Urcuyo was the first person in Contra Costa County to receive Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine and he feels confident that despite the speed at which the vaccine was created, it has been well researched and vetted.
"It feels like this was done on the spot suddenly, but this is actually the summation of decades and decades of medical research kinda coming to fruition. And so this was a technology that was ready to go and waiting for COVID-19, not the other way around."
The technology is a new kind of vaccine, the mRNA vaccine.
Unlike traditional vaccines that put weak or inactive virus into our bodies to trigger an immune response, mRNA vaccines teach the cells how to create immunity to the virus.
"I would reassure people to say that the technology has been studied and used quite a bit - mostly in studies in lab animals, of course, until now. It just happens to be this is the first go-around in terms of humans," said Dr. Urcuyo.
Pfizer plans to continue to follow trial participants to gather more data on the efficacy of the vaccine and determine if they are any delayed side effects.
Some Americans have raised concerns that because the first volunteers only received the vaccine this summer, it is not known if any issues could arise down the line. However, Dr. Urcuyo says that is highly unlikely.
"Really, the complications that you expect to see with vaccines, they happen in those first six weeks. We don’t know of anything that happens later for other vaccines, and so why would we expect that for this vaccine when, as a molecule itself, the body breaks it down really well?"
Healthcare workers across the country started receiving the vaccine Monday.
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