Off like a shot: the race for a covid-19 vaccine

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Ethiopia erupted into violence last week when a popular singer was assassinated. The killing has exposed the ethnic tensions and the mistrust of government that are threatening the country's delicate transition from autocratic rule to democracy. And a rollicking cloak and dagger tale is playing out in Fiji. A self described spy offered his services to the state broadcaster, promising to get dirt on the opposition. What followed was a story of spy pens, police raids and not just a little embarrassment, But first, No sooner had the pandemic taken hold than talk turned to a vaccine, a cure all, a one shot fix that could vanquish the virus. As recently as last week, President Donald Trump repeated his pledge that a vaccine would be available this year.

We'll likely have a therapeutic and or vaccine solution long before the end of the year.

That isn't a promise he can make. And two days later, the head of America's Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, wouldn't make it. I can't predict when a vaccine will be available. Regulators have two core a vaccine candidate must be proven both safe and effective. Yesterday, Anthony Fauci, head of America's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Trump administration's go to health expert cautiously suggested that by early next year, those two concerns would be addressed.

Whenever you're dealing with a vaccine development.

There'S never a guarantee that your candidate will be both safe and effective. But that will be just the beginning of the story. For a treatment that every person on Earth will want. Vaccine development typically takes 10 or even 15 years. But the urgency that COVID 19 brought has sparked a global race starting six months ago this week, when the virus's genome was first published. And one lab in Britain had a bit of a head start.

On January 11, the day after the sequence of the new virus was released, a woman called Sarah Gilbert rushed into her laboratory.

Natasha Loder is the Economist's Health Policy editor.

She works at the Jenner Institute in Oxford, which is known around the world for making vaccines. And with the new sequence of the virus, she was able to start work on her vaccine six months later. Her group at the Jenner Institute are now the furthest ahead in the world with developing a vaccine against COVID 19.

And why is it. Why is it that that team had a jump on this?

So a vaccine that they're producing is called a recombinant vaccine. And so what they do is they take a virus that's quite common and harmless and they package a little piece of genetic information from the virus in it. And so that when that's given to someone, your body manufactures a little bit of the COVID 19 virus and creates antibodies. And they were working on a vaccine for MERS, which is a very similar virus to SARS CoV2, which causes COVID19. And so the experience that they'd had in making this vaccine for MERS meant that they were very quickly able to start work on a new vaccine. And it also meant that the regulatory agencies, which have to sort of approve all the different steps that they're going to take when they introduce this new vaccine into human beings, had a really good idea of what they were going to expect from this new vaccine, because they'd sort of seen a very similar one before.

And how does all that look with respect to the broader. The global hunt for a vaccine? Oxford leads the race, but what does the rest of the race look like?

Well, the rest of the race is really interesting. Oxford wasn't at the head of the race at the start of this. The first into humans was a group called Moderna, and they're working on a vaccine that's called a nucleic acid vaccine or an RNA vaccine. And that's sort of essentially more like a naked piece of the virus itself, which is then delivered into the body. Moderna is doing really well. They're not into phase three trials. Pfizer too is similarly developing an RNA vaccine, which looks really exciting. The RNA vaccines are interesting because they can be manufactured quite quickly. The challenge is that we've not actually ever had one approved for use in humans. And so there's more of a learning curve than there is with some of the older style vaccines. There's also a whole bunch of Chinese vaccines that have been doing quite well. But the challenge that the Chinese have got at the moment with all their vaccines is they have no patience in China to do their efficacy studies, so they have to find a place and a way of doing them abroad. And although one vaccine is supposed to be starting phase three trials, we actually haven't heard very much, much really about how that's going and where that's happening.

And what about the international dimension of this? The likelihood that it will be one country that develops it first and then what? Then what happens to that finding?

So Britain's Prime Minister, Boris Johnson has said it isn't a competition between countries, we're trying to win against the virus.

The race to discover the vaccine to.

Defeat this virus is not a competition between countries, countries, but the most urgent shared endeavour of our lifetimes, it's humanity.

But there are undoubtedly nationalistic issues here and concerns about equitable access. It actually does depend which vaccine as to how widely available it is. One of the nice elements of the Oxford vaccine is that it has got a lot of international support and buy in and advance purchase. And so I think we can be fairly confident that if the vaccine works and it's approved, it's going to be widely distributed. With other vaccines, it's not quite so clear.

So regardless of who produces the first one, how will they be scaled up, distributed, made available to all the people around the world who need them?

Well, scaling up again, depends on the kind of vaccine. Now, when it comes to, say, the Oxford vaccine, you know, you have to start with a small bioreactor and cook up the vaccine in this bioreactor. And then when you're happy with what you're getting, you go to a slightly larger one and then a slightly larger one. And at the point in which, you know you have four very large bioreactors of about 2000 liters, you can produce about a billion doses every couple of months. It's different if you're producing a nucleic acid vaccine. It's a lot more of a sort of continuous and flexible process at the moment. What we're going to see towards the end of the year is if the Moderna vaccine, if the Pfizer vaccine, if the Oxford vaccine are all effective and safe, you'll start to see sort of limited use, right, emergency use. The regulators will say, do you know what? We've seen one trial, we're happy for it to be given, say, to healthcare workers on a, you know, a very cautious basis. And perhaps at the start of next year, for example, the Oxford vaccine could be in a position at the start of next year to get full regulatory approval for their vaccine. But these are all timescales that are very much dependent on certain things happening. I mean, everyone wants this to happen quickly, but, you know, the regulators have to be confident that it's safe and it's effective.

And what is the chance, to your mind, that exactly none of the 180 different attempts that are going on now will be both safe and effective?

Almost practically zero. I think we're going to get a vaccine. I think it's going to work. The things that weigh on my mind are how long is that protection going to last and is it going to be a bit like painting the fourth bridge red? Like we have to vaccinate everyone every couple of years and it's difficult to get round to everyone. We just don't know what the characteristics of a successful vaccine are going to look like. I mean, one possibility is that, like the flu vaccine, it can stop you dying of flu, but it's not going to stop you spreading the flu. So there are all sorts of ifs and buts when it comes to vaccines. But I'm very confident that we will get one because I don't think this is going to be like HIV or malaria, where it's going to be just technically very difficult. That's not the sense I'm getting. What I'm hearing from the people who work on these things is they're saying, look, there is always a risk that it might not work, but they think they're going to find something.

Natasha, thanks very much for joining us.

Jason. A pleasure as ever.

To follow all of the Economist's coverage of the COVID 19 pandemic and how it's swiftly reshaping the world, visit economist.com coronavirus. The music of Ethiopian singer Hashalu Hundesa has been the soundtrack of Oromo protests against the government for the past decade. The Oromo are the country's largest ethnic group. They've complained for decades of marginalization and exclusion from political power. Protests between 2014 and 2018 led the current prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, himself Oromo, to power. Once in office, he promised change. But last week Hashelu was murdered and his killing sparked mass unrest. Two nights of gunfire, arson and looting. Abiy's government has responded with violence and has cut off the Internet. At least 166 people have been killed. The unrest threatens Ethiopia's already fragile transition to democracy.

Hashalu Hundesa was a very popular musician and an activist. He'd grown up in quite humble beginnings. He started out looking after his family's cattle, but he became radicalized quite early, ended up going into prison in 2003 at the age of 17. He was locked away for five years.

Jonathan Rosenthal is the Economist's Africa editor.

Prison sort of really formed him both as a political activist as well as a musician. He came out saying afterwards that he'd learnt to write lyrics and to really pursue his music while in prison, as well as learning about the history of Ethiopia's Oromo groups and its struggle for greater self determination.

And his assassination has apparently sparked great unrest in Ethiopia.

Yes, it has. So the exact circumstances around his death are not yet entirely clear. He was shot. The police have now said they've arrested four suspects. But his death seems to have sort of absolutely galvanized young Oromos. Many, many thousands of them took to the streets. Many came into the capital, Addis Ababa, protesting, some in sorrow. The Oromo have long felt oppressed in Ethiopia and they'd been rising up against this. There'd been massive protests between 2014 and 2018 to which he provided the soundtrack. So many people really saw this killing not just as the killing of the person, but an attack on the movement and on the Oroma identity.

And how has the government responded to Hashalu's death and the unrest that followed?

So there have been, I guess, two sides of reaction to this and in many ways that's embodied by the Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed. Abiy was for many years a figurehead of this Oromo resistance movement. It was this Oromo protest that actually pushed him into the seat of the Prime Minister's office. And on the one hand he's offered soothing words, he's tried to calm down the anger. On the other hand, he's resorted with quite a heavy hand. At least 1,200 people are said to have been arrested. Many of these will have just been looters and violent protesters. But many of them were not. Many of them were peaceful protesters. And in places the security Forces have been particularly heavy handed and have opened fire on protesters. Mourners just trying to attend his funeral are among those who've been shot.

And so what does the situation look like on the ground now?

I think a calm of sorts has returned. It's not quite as bad as it was in the first few days after the death when there was gunfire on the streets every night. Shops are reopening, people are starting to go out about their business. But the state is keeping a very heavy grip on the situation. There are soldiers guarding the roads into Addis Ababa. Bits of Iran are still cut off by roadblocks and the security forces and they've still kept the Internet block in place. So people have not got their civil liberties back.

And so what happens now, now that these fault lines have been so exposed?

So there are a couple of issues. It is not just the Oromo now who are demanding more rights and demanding sort of more control of land. You're seeing many other smaller groupings trying to demand greater ethnic rights. And part of that comes back to the original sin of Ethiopia's current contin constitution, which really granted rights and land to ethnic groups. Rather than specifically saying, you know, all rights go to individuals. And by baking it into the constitution, it's really encouraged people to think of themselves not as, not as unified Ethiopians, but as, you know, sort of Amharic or Aromo or Tigrayans or the like. And Ethiopia really is at a crisis point now. It has to decide whether it wants to follow the example of, let's say, South Africa, where different groups and different ethnicities came together under kind of different new nationalism and decided to work together to build a modern, successful country, or frankly, it may end up going the way of the Balkans, where these different ethnicities sort of break up the state into much smaller countries. And that carries a huge risk of the kinds of violence we saw in the Balkans with ethnic cleansing and border disputes and a really messy breakup.

So Ahashulu's assassination and all this unrest, do you think it really could derail Ethiopia's democratic transition?

So it was already really fragile. Ethiopia has gone through repeated bouts of dictatorial rule with brief periods of kind of flowering and opening. And there was a real hope that this Oromo movement that put Abiy Ahmed in position as prime minister would lead to an opening. He came and he initially promised free elections and promised a liberalization, and to some extent has done that. Thousands of political prisoners were released when he first came in. But a lot of that movement towards democracy hinged on elections that were scheduled for August, it was seen as giving legitimacy to a state that in previous elections had really rigged the vote. In the past election, it claimed 99% of voters had supported it. So this was a crucial election and it's been postponed indefinitely because of COVID 19. So that's already really worrying. And the longer this election gets postponed and the more those underlying tensions simmer between the different ethnicities, the sort of distrust of people of the state and frankly, the state's continued use of force and kind of readiness to arrest and shoot opponents. As long as all of those underlying tensions persist, there are real questions over this move to democracy.

Jonathan, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Spy Pens Opposition agents leaked state secrets all things you'd expect in your favorite Cold War spy movie. A place where you probably wouldn't expect the movie to be set is Fiji.

It's a very peculiar, bizarre event where apparently this character, Feral Farazil Khan, walked in off the street into the headquarters of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation and offered to access one of these surreptitious websites Fiji exposed to remove anti government and anti Fiji Broadcasting Corporation stories.

John Frankel writes about the Pacific Islands for the Economist.

There are many of these websites in Fiji that have been annoying the government ever since the coup of 2006. So they were quite interested to get access to this and find out what was going on. And he demonstrated to the head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation that he was actually able to do this.

And so what did he offer to do?

Well, he also said that he had been paid by the opposition to put up some of these anti government stories and apparently to hack into the website of the Fiji Electoral Commission to demonstrate evidence that the last elections in 2014, 2018, had been rigged. So they were quite interested in this and they said, could you provide some evidence? And he said, yes, but you'll have to equip me with some kind of recording device. So they looked around and they found this spy pen that could be used to record the opposition doing what they were not supposed to be doing. And off this character went to try and get information recorded on the spy pen.

So the state broadcaster sends this alleged agent back to gather information on the opposition with a spy pen. What did he get?

Well, he got absolutely nothing. He came back saying that he hadn't been able to record any information because the spy pen had allegedly not worked. At this point, the head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation sort of realized that something odd was afoot and threatened to report the whole incident. To the police.

So what did he do about it?

All this triggered the head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation to call a very peculiar press conference.

Morning, everyone. This press conference today is in regards to Mr. Feral Khan, to set the.

Record straight, claims that he never believed anything that this character put to him.

We, of course, found this very, very hard to believe.

And then at the end, in response to a question coming from one of the journalists, admits to have supplied this spy pen to Mr. Kahn to go off and collect all this information.

He wanted a recording device. The only recording device that we had was a pen that had a camera in it. And we did give him a recording device, but we did not know when and where, how he was going to use it. So what is the real story here? This man is a fabulist? Or this man was actually working for the opposition all along? Or a curious double agent who is just not very good at it?

I think a curious double agent is not very good at it who keeps trying to sell strange tales to this head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation. I think the important thing here, though, is that the head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation is no ordinary fellow. He is the brother of the Attorney General, Ayaz Saadkayam. And Aya Sayad Kehem is effectively the Prime Minister. He's not officially the prime minister, but Aya said Khem runs the show. He's commonly known as Minister for Everything or A to Z because he has his fingers on every issue. And they've been for years running a constant battle against the opposition.

And so what happens now with this particular tale? I mean, the broadcasting corporation and the Attorney General have been surely somewhat embarrassed by it all.

Yes, the whole thing was taken sufficiently seriously by the Fiji police force to launch raids on the offices of the two major opposition parties. Nothing illegal has happened here. All that's happened is that the head of the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation looks very silly. And I think now they'll move along to other issues. But this kind of effort to harass the opposition in various ways is likely to continue, I think, over the years ahead, running up to the next election in 2022.

But nothing with spy pens and hapless spies.

I suspect that everyone will be very keen to see steer clear of spy pens from now on.

John, thanks very much for joining us.

Pleasure.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can find a special offer on a subscription to the economist@examiner.com intelligenceoffer See you back here tomorrow.