- Six senior clinicians in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits University have volunteered to participate in South Africas first COVID-19 vaccine trial. To proclaim these trials a success is to take for granted that exposing people to viral proteins will trigger a vigorous, long-lasting immune response. If this is so, it will be a problem for Covid-19 vaccine candidates that use natural variants of the virus proteins as antigens. Manipulating immune memoryAnother possibility is that coronaviruses have developed the means to manipulate the human immune response to its own advance. * One reason we don’t have the information we need is the start-stop nature of coronavirus research funding.

Source: Forbes July 16, 2020 19:18 UTC