“today you don’t need to get the virus in hand”
Tony Fauci
https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/18197306
Coronavirus Infections—More Than Just the Common Cold
JAMA
” .. Howard Bauchner: Hello and welcome to this author interview and I’m told that we’re also streaming live. This is Howard Bauchner, Editor-in-Chief of JAMA, and I’m here with Tony Fauci, who is the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the NIH. Welcome, Tony.
HB: You know, Tony, about a year, 18 months ago, you wrote a wonderful viewpoint for us about the ability to accelerate the development of vaccines. It was extraordinary. You showed this incredible table or figure that vaccine development, when it’s emergent, has come down from 18 or 24 months down to 3 or 4 months. If the cases in China spread and it does become a global epidemic, where would we be with vaccine development for this condition?
AF: The Chinese, when they made the diagnosis and showed it was a coronavirus, they put the sequence up on a public database. As you well know and as I mentioned in the article that I wrote as the viewpoint, today you don’t need to get the virus in hand. All you need is the sequence because the platforms that we use in vaccinology now are generally all gene-based or molecular biology recombinant DNA technology-based. So, we partnered with a company called Moderna that specializes in messenger RNA platform. We got the sequence. The protein to which we want to make antibodies is the spike protein of the coronavirus….”
“today you don’t need to get the virus in hand”
Tony Fauci