Or g'kar Coming up this afternoon, two o'clock, Theo international community put pressure on a former Soviet republic to drop the death penalty. Enlightened nations. The argument goes, have abolished capital punishment. But on the other hand, there is the death penalty in the United States. If they have it, why should we abolish it? Why Kazakhstan has stopped executions even as the U. S carries on that story on the world. This is science Friday. I'm Ira Plato At the beginning of 2020. There were no vaccines available, much less approved for covert 19. But now in the first weeks of 2021 we have to as well as a pipeline of dozens of vaccine candidates in clinical trials, as does has become available for frontline health care workers and the broader public. Trust is a concern. We've even heard from listeners who wonder if he sped up time line or the novelty of him already a are compromising safety. I think I sort of understand how our current vaccines for like smallpox work, But I'm not sure I understand what it is. That happens with these Marine A vaccines. How much Confidence do we have in the efficacy of this treatment, primarily due to the fact that it was pushed so fast? I'm a pediatrician in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Even among the community of parents who accept all other vaccines. There's some hesitancy, there should be a way to explain how the streamlined vaccine approval did not sacrifice safety considerations. Thanks to listeners Tom Arnold and Isabel for their comments on our science Friday. Box Papa while SARS cov two feels like it came out of nowhere. These vaccines did not their rest atop years of research vaccine technologies with proven safety records. Tweak just a bit for this new virus. Even m. RNA is not new. We can thank the first SARS epidemic for much of that. Influenza and HIV vaccine research have also contributed here to talk about it to vaccine researchers with their own cove in 19 vaccines in the pipeline. Dr. Maria Elena Petacchi is associate dean at the National School of Tropical Medicine, Baylor College of Medicine and co director of Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development in Houston. She's done work on SARS and is part of a project to make vaccine for covert 19 welcome Dr Ba Tazi. Hi. Good morning, Ira. Very nice to be with you. And Dr Rama Amara, professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory University's National Primate Research Center. He joins us from Atlanta. He's been applying his expertise from work on HIV vaccines. Also in the name of a covert vaccine this year. Welcome back to Amara. Hi. I had a really nice to be with you. I used to have both of you with us. Let me do a time warp. Let's do a time work back to let's say it's January 2020 doctor, but Tazi and you're researching SARS and there's Let's say, and you've just heard about a new virus with pandemic potential. Tell me Tell me what the vaccine researchers do first. Absolutely. So, In fact, it was more like December of 2019 when we already worse hearing about this pneumonia like virus, So they moment January 11. We got the sequence. That he was a source like coronavirus. We took that sequence and compared it in that case, too, for us to the star sequence. We saw that both sequences where around 80% similar and we tanker that very quickly because we already knew how to our work with it from our service experience. And honestly, I have to tell you what we used to do for stars that took us 34 years. We actually managed to do it in 34 months because we knew exactly how to manipulate the new sequence. So that's what we did. First we looked at the sequence took it, synthesize it and put it into our yeast expression system to be able to make. Are recommending proteins. So you your lab was already ready to get working on this. Absolutely. This is what we were trained for. Our center now has 20 years of operation. We have, of course many other vaccines were working on. But we've already had 10. Years of experience working on Corona virus vaccines, Merced as well, a sour So as you mentioned And Dr Mara, you were working on HIV vaccines before pivoting to covert candidate. What could you apply from this work on the HIV vaccine to this virus? Absolutely. So that is about of information that we learned from the HIV vaccine development. We are interested in using both neutralizing antibody as one last cycle, toxic killer P cells as well as help of city 40 Selves. Against the virus That would give you a broad coverage from the immune system to attack the wires from multiple fronts. And we learned a lot about the safety of this and how to deliver it and how to make high levels of this southwest protein when Maxine is delivered And we also know that what kind of immune responses that Maxine and uses oven Mitt is given considering all that. When we decided to make a Corona virus vaccine, we could jump right into it and then made of vaccine within a few weeks. So in other words, you already knew how to tweak the immune system to respond to the HIV vaccine. And you you adjusted that for the new vaccine, that's good. So the success of the coffin Maintain vaccines. Stem in large part from the work that's being done on the HIV vaccine. I absolutely believe that because a lot of money that enlisted in the HIV vaccine development and paid off And making the corporate 19 vaccine. For example, whatever AstraZeneca is using, even remember now, and Pfizer and violent can change A All these platforms have been used actually developed for HIV. So all of these platforms were invalid. And Batou, right? So all these words don't look for HIV and then because so much knowledge knowledge existed now they're able to were all able to quickly apply this full Congress 19. And I don't know if you realize, But the clinical trial networks around the world where these vaccines actually are being evaluated, actually are HIV vaccine trial networks. Yeah, so they really mobilized all the HIV is infrastructure, not only technology but the infrastructure. And that has given even a lot of the low middle income countries the opportunity to evaluate some vaccines because they just Locked into an infrastructure that was created with HIV funding. Do you think that success with the covert 19 vaccine is going to spur Development of an HIV vaccine in general had a real vaccine program has been so slow because they follow standard vaccine development Park. I'm hoping that now the experience with the covert vaccines I think they would actually try to change things, toe speed things up..