Vaccination against COVID-19 at the Department of Occupational Medicine at the University Hospital in Pilsen

Overview

On December 31, 2021, exactly 2 years will pass when the city health commission in Wuhan, China, reported to the WHO the occurrence of a larger number of patients with symptoms of pneumonia of unknown origin. It was a new, then undescribed, type of coronavirus, which for a long time became without a doubt the most watched media topic in the world. Even after two years, it is clear, that there are still questions about the origin of the virus, its mutations, the number of infected and dead. As no effective treatment for this disease was available, great emphasis was placed on vaccine development. The goal was and is to stop the pandemic and bring the disease under control. Vaccine development work began immediately after the virus was identified. The urgency of the COVID-19 vaccine has reduced the normal length of time it takes to develop a standard vaccine to months, not years. It has been based on experience in the development of coronavirus vaccines against the already known diseases SARS and MERS, tested only in animals. These vaccines were not developed because the diseases were controlled. Historically, the fastest vaccine development has taken 4 years since virus collection to approval, in the 1960s for mumps. One year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, on December 2, 2020, Comirnaty from Pfizer/BioNTech became the first fully tested and approved vaccine. In the Czech Republic, the first dose was given in Prague on 27 December 2020.

Keywords:

vaccination – Vaccine development – coronavirus – COVID-19 disease