Progress thanks to the chemical industry

All of them can be scientifically refuted. Basically, even higher safety requirements apply to vaccines than to medications, because vaccines are administered to healthy people. Modern research is making huge efforts to offer vaccines that have a minimum of side effects. However, in the past some vaccines have in fact caused undesired effects. That’s why comprehensive safety testing is so important.

Each society has to answer for itself the question of how to deal with this process at the ethical and political levels. In my opinion, we have to proceed carefully and conduct stringent testing. I think it would be not only risky but also unethical to administer a vaccine that has not been properly tested to the general population. You first have to investigate how long the protection will last and the safety aspects over time. Especially in cases where side effects occur only very rarely, these side effects might be seen only years later.

The vaccines that are currently being discussed in connection with SARS-CoV-2—the novel coronavirus— are primarily vaccines whose mechanism of action is based on ribonucleic acid, or RNA. The RNA converts genetic information into proteins, and—according to everything we know—it is not integrated into the genetic material of human beings. I have no fears of that.

In the case of a few vaccine candidates, we’re hoping that one or more of them may still be approved in 2020. However, we can only arrive at a comprehensive safety assessment in the course of a vaccine’s actual use

We don’t know. One difference between the measles virus and SARS-CoV-2 is that there are people who were infected with the coronavirus but did not produce any antibodies. It’s even possible that herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2 will fail to materialize because coronaviruses are programmed for reinfection. If we succeed in developing vaccines that lack the functions of the virus that are responsible for “immune evasion,” a vaccination could even protect us more effectively than a previous infection.

A very important role. For example, take the lipid nanoparticles that are used in mRNA vaccines. Transfection reagents of this kind are a key determinant of the effectiveness of the vaccines, because they enable the mRNA to be transferred into the cells. They determine which cells the vaccine can penetrate, as well as how effective and stable it will be. If this method is successful against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it would be an entry point into a new class of vaccines, and maybe even into completely new principles of vaccination.

Absolutely! I can even imagine that in the future we will produce cocktails of messenger RNAs and thus combine multiple vaccinations. That would make it possible to generate much higher levels of immunity with far fewer individual vaccinations. It would be a big step forward.

It would be naive to believe that through vaccinations we can eliminate all diseases. However, I expect that in the future we will be able to block more infectious diseases by means of vaccinations. But we have to be patient. That’s why I’m not happy at all about the current talk about a “race” to develop a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2. The winner is not necessarily the one who starts out fastest. This is a marathon, not a sprint.

Photo: Jürgen Brandel