Two years ago, these days, we found ourselves facing a new enemy: Covid-19. At that moment I had in front of me, like my fellow researchers and doctors, a sort of “empty cabinet” of knowledge, diagnostic tests, preventive and therapeutic tools. I therefore took up the challenge of helping to face this new enemy starting from the roots of Western philosophy, that is, from “knowing you don’t know”. While doctors and nurses, including many from Humanitas, volunteered on the front line, research was advancing. Then as now, periodic meetings with clinicians have been a school for me, also of humility. I received a lot and tried to contribute to the questions that arose from the patients’ bed.
In a world that closed borders, the scientific community was breaking down barriers. “Immunology without borders”, just as the motto of the International Union of Immunological Societies of which I am Past President says. In the first weeks of the pandemic, I saw communication between scientists grow. I participated in webinars with over 100 thousand colleagues, celebrated the Day of Immunology with 105 countries present: everyone wanted to know, understand, learn. The way of communicating has changed: now data is shared in Open Access.
An attempt was made to respond to the emergency with emergency research, also supported by civil society with important donations. Humanitas, for example, was able to count on the contribution of Dolce & Gabbana, followed by many others, from which important fruits have sprouted: a new biomarker of gravity for Covid and long Covid and the discovery of an immunoresistance mechanism.
Two years of Covid: who’s to blame?
by Daniela Minerva
But against Covid, as often happens in research, the failures were also valuable: the majority of pharmacological approaches used in the early stages of the pandemic – antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, plasma therapy, ivermectin, antibiotics – proved useless, but the precise documentation of these failures saved resources to national health systems and toxicity to patients, orienting research. Success sprouted from failures: a low-cost drug, glucocorticoids, new antivirals, cytokine-inhibiting drugs, words of immunity spoken at the wrong time.
And then the “miracle”: the first vaccines against Covid in less than 12 months. A miracle that has several roots: investments, cancer research, fundamental research. The belief – shared with Maria Rescigno, Professor of General Pathology at Humanitas – that the vaccination campaign should be accompanied by scientific research made us achieve important results in just one month, documenting, among the first, that those who recovered from the disease had a very high response with a dose of vaccine. Counting the disease as a dose led to the saving of millions of doses in the early stages of the vaccination campaign, and is now part of vaccination policy.
I am proud that our country has been extraordinarily effective in fastening the seat belt that the vaccine represents. By vaccinating – we are one of the countries with the highest vaccination rate in the world – and by studying. Currently there are 40 vaccines in clinical trials, and about 100 in preclinical: research must continue to develop new ones, additional safety belts for new variants and fragile patients. Today 60% of the world population is vaccinated, but in low-income countries only 5.5%. We need to do more: it is a question of solidarity, but also of security. Leaving the virus running means exposing yourself to the risk of variants such as Delta born in India, Beta in South Africa, Omicron in Africa.
As I often repeat, the vaccine must be accompanied by correct information, which enables people to make an informed choice. Personally, I have always been involved in scientific dissemination, and in the face of the pandemic and uncertainty I felt the duty to share my knowledge directly with people, respecting scientific data, skills and social responsibility.
I spoke and answered questions, via the web or in person, in 500 meetings with parents’ associations, with trade unions, in factories, in churches, with CUAMM volunteers for Africa, in schools of all grades, in clubs like Lions and Rotary. I tried to administer vaccines against disinformation and fake news, because we exported the disinformation virus from our world via the Internet: it had never happened before, but today 30% of the population in Africa hesitates to get vaccinated.
Yet this is the only tool we have to recover a “new” normal. I like to remember the sense of liberation and the joy of the first return to the cinema with my wife, and then to the Piccolo Teatro and the premiere of La Scala about the lockdowns, the Christmas not celebrated, the friends not met. They are the promise of a slightly different normality, in which perhaps in certain situations we will use masks, as we already saw in eastern airports in pre-Covid times.