Czech doctor explains how the COVID-19 vaccines were developed so quickly for ROMEA TV
The willingness of people in the Czech Republic to allow themselves to be vaccinated against COVID-19 has grown slightly since the end of 2020. At the start of January, 54 % of adults in the country were interested in being vaccinated free of charge.
As research about attitudes to vaccaination in other countries has demonstrated, the willingness to be vaccinated is lower among ethnic minorities. This apparently is also the case among Romani people in the Czech Republic.
Several opinions and questions associated with vaccination are being repeated rather frequently on Czech social media, including by Romani social media users. What is the vaccine against COVID-19 made of, for example?
The vaccines were developed quite quickly – does that mean they are of low quality? To what degree are they effective?
ROMEA TV is releasing a series of videos in which Dr Marie Nejedlá of the National Institute of Public Health answers these questions. In the second video in the series she describes how the vaccine against the novel coronavirus was developed and explains that it was not developed abnormally fast.
“Given that all available resources were put into developing these vaccines and that the developers were taking advantage of their past experience, enough time was taken to develop them. There were three phases of clinical trials using volunteers that were carefully performed, statistically processed, and their findings are publicly available,” Nejedlá says in the video.
In the interview, Nejedlá reminds viewers that coronaviruses have already been the subject of research for decades. In 2003, in southeastern Asia, the SARS infection appeared, and in 2012 the MERS infection appeared there, both of which were caused by coronaviruses of a different kind.
This means coronaviruses have long been the subject of research, and the principles for developing vaccines against them, moreover, are also something that has been known to science for several decades. Also, enormous financing was invested into developing the vaccines for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.
