The arrival of vaccines against the coronavirus has amazed everyone, even insiders, those who have known and worked with viruses and bacteria for some time. If on the one hand, however, the temptation to speak of a “miracle” is strong, citing the arrival of vaccines in record time – and unthinkable so far – on the other, the experts know that there is nothing inexplicable. Studies on mRna vaccines had been underway for years and the enormous investment of resources and coordinated work catalysed by the pandemic did the rest. “Vaccines are estimated to have saved twenty million people, and if we had more, even more lives would have been saved. Thanks to vaccines, the economy is starting up again, despite a thousand difficulties”, explained Rino Rappuoli, an international authority on vaccines, Gold Medal of Merit for Public Health in 2005, speaking at the talk “Us and them. New viruses, resistant bacteria, returning germs” promoted within the Health Festival.
The challenge has been and continues to be particularly demanding: however much research and technology can develop innovative tools, the fate of the battle against pathogens also depends on the quality of immunity that is provided by the healing of the infection. “For example, those who recover from measles are protected forever, the same happens to those who are vaccinated against measles. Whoever catches pertussis is not protected for life, it is for some years, the pertussis vaccine does the same thing”, added the infectious disease specialist Roberto Burioni, also a guest of the talk. “We now coexist peacefully with the four coronaviruses that spilled over a long time ago, we know that they are very contagious, that they mainly infect children under the age of ten, and that they confer a short-lived immunity against the infection, but robust in against serious illness”.
This is exactly what happened thanks to the mRna vaccines developed against Sars-CoV2, not yet able to protect us from infections, but safe and effective in protecting us from serious illness. And the test bed against the coronavirus marked a turning point in the history of these vaccines, not only against infectious diseases: “The mRna vaccines mark a before and after in medicine, as did antibiotics or X-rays or even , ultrasound – Burioni said again – there are exciting prospects, also considering that the testing and production of an mRNA vaccine is much cheaper and faster. The future that we can imagine, for example, is to take a person’s tumor, sequence it, understand with an algorithm the points that can be attacked and put into production a vaccine against the single tumor of the single patient”.
