From here to immunity

There’s no quick way out of the coronavirus pandemic. Vaccines need money, time and luck, says Florence Walker

- Florence Walker

When I read the headline ‘LOSS OF TASTE SYMPTOM OF KILLER VIRUS’, I lifted an eyebrow.

That moment, I was lathering up a fried-egg sandwich with enough English mustard to blow the nose off an elephant. I couldn’t taste a thing.

Did I have it? I’m certain I did. For me, as it will be for the majority of the world, Sars-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) was no more inconvenient than losing my wallet. And yet even the small percentage of people who will have a life-threatening response translates into a number of patients that might overwhelm the NHS. This in spite of public-health policies to flatten the curve which has led to the lockdown.

Can’t we hurry up and find a way out of this thing? Let’s just vaccinate everyone and have done with it. Can ‘scientists’ please just pull their finger out and find a ‘cure’, preferably by next Wednesday? Professor Sarah Gilbert at Oxford says she’s 80% sure there’ll be a vaccine by autumn. Here’s hoping – but it’s likely to take much longer than that.