"Countless initiatives give us hope during these trying times."
With the ECQ extended up to May 15 in most parts of the country, people are asking whether this rolling lockdown will now become the new normal. The answer is clear: We will have to live with COVID-19 up to the end of the year or until a vaccine gets off the laboratories into general use. Until then, we will just have to work within the imposed medical protocols and bear with it.
Life as we know it is changing, but we take comfort in the fact that the most cherished of human values remain the same. With even more intensity in many cases. Like sharing and compassion. Caring and looking after one another. Being good neighbors. Appreciating discovery, initiative and innovation.
The last virtue is not surprising at all. After all, a lot of the medicines and even everyday materials now being used to make life a little better were products of discovery under stressful and grave circumstances. Unfortunately though, even "kill machines" and weapons of mass destruction were products of such circumstances.
But no matter. What is important is we are seeing these initiatives, breakthroughs and, yes, sharing between and among experts and scientists and even competing companies and countries as we navigate our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic. This makes us hopeful about the prospects of slowing down the pandemic and curing it in due time.
In Asia, Chinese, Taiwanese, and South Korean scientists are moving forward with working on possible vaccines and cures immediately after identifying the COVID-19 genome. There are strong indications that they may come out with candidate vaccines as early as September and a possible cure a year from now. Of course, these initiatives come with the usual protocols including, as they say, good habits such as social distancing, hand washing and wearing of face masks, which will most likely be the " lifestyle" of the new normal even beyond any of the discoveries. Sadly, we are being advised that one of the most advanced candidate cure—Redisivir—which is being tested by the Chinese in cooperation with a US biotech company, Gilead, has had negative results so far. So, back to the drawing board for the partnership. The race goes on.
Now we learn that an Israeli biotech company has also gone forward with its own vaccine which, if the reports are correct, is about to undergo first-phase trials. There is also an ongoing laboratory testing by a team from the University of Pittsburg which is expected to be rolled out for trials next month. Another promising development is the ongoing efforts of a team of experts from Johnson and Johnson in partnership with the US government to roll out a vaccine which is now considered globally as the lead candidate among all others in experimentation. And, as we were writing this piece, news came out that Oxford University scientist Sara Gilbert and her team are rolling out their own vaccine called ChAdOx1nCov-19 which promises to overtake all others in rolling out. Already, Gilbert's team has put together a group of 510 volunteers for the test – considered the first of such scale on humans. This development, coming after Gilbert's earlier success in developing the Ebola vaccine, has raised not only people's hopes but the global population in prayers for its eventual realization.
We are not being left behind. Immediately after announcing the ECQ extension, President Duterte upped the reward to be given to our very own experts and scientists who can come out with a vaccine, maybe even a cure, for COVID-19 to P50 million from an initial P10 million. He even laughingly said that if he is so satisfied with the results, he can go as high as P100 million just to get our best minds going.
There is also an offer to the government submitted by a multinational group of medical experts and scientists convened out of Switzerland by a Fil-Am finance and technology whizkid, Rogelio " Vonz" Santos Jr., to undertake research on a COVID-19 vaccine and cure at no cost to the government. The group has been talking with the UP and DOST for possible collaboration on this effort.
