What Vaccines Did Australia Choose for the Treatment of Coronavirus? Dr Norman Swan

by | Coronavirus - COVID-19, Coronavirus - Vaccinations, Immunity

So Australia has chose four vaccines, they chose the Pfizer vaccine, the Astra vaccine, which is the chimpanzee virus, they chose the Novavax vaccine, which has yet to come out, but it’s where they inject part of the coronavirus spike directly, and they chose the University of Queensland vaccine.

And so the University of Queensland vaccine has fallen over, because… It’s a complicated story, but they use part of the human immunodeficiency virus to wrap around and fix the spike protein, so it didn’t change when it was injected into the body, and created antibodies to part of the HIV. Controversial story, which I’m not going to labour just now.

We chose the Pfizer vaccine because it was one of two vaccines that were using the same technology, the MRNA technology. And Pfizer was more international than the other one. Moderna was much more fixed on providing for the American market, and I think that the conclusion was that Pfizer was much more likely to be able to supply vaccine in larger amounts earlier than the Moderna vaccine.

So they made a decision based on technology, spreading the technological risk, using the MRNA, using a virus to take in the genetic message, using direct injection of the spike protein, and to spread the risk, and then the ability of the company to supply millions of doses to Australia.

Dr Norman Swan, Physician and Journalist