Summary
Article: The Race for a Zika Vaccine
This article talks through the process three doctors went through to find two possible vaccines for Zika. Dr. Abbink, Dr. Larocca, and Dr. Barouch first began working together when Barouch discovered Zika outside of a textbook, after being in the field for over a decade. He originally thought it dengue fever, or west Nile virus because when Zika was so rare, “If you had come to the lab back then, there would have been no mosquito pictures, and no mention of Zika,” (Mukherjee 1) After working together for months, they decided to pursue two types of vaccines. The first type is what is known as “Naked DNA”, and the other known as “bait-and-switch. After they made each vaccine, they tested it on mice. After they were both was successful in mice, they were both successful in monkeys. Now, because of success in animals. Both of their vaccines are about to be started on a clinical trial, and if the trial is successful, it could be on the market as soon as 2018.
Commentary…show more content… Some of the author’s best points were when they used the example of the 2016 Rio Olympics. By using the C.D.C.’s warning to pregnant women not to travel to the region as a major backbone on why what the doctors were doing was important. They also used a number from the C.D.C. about the rising number of babies being born with microcephaly in Brazil. This was used along with the number of cases of microcephaly in mice pups that were inoculated with the disease. These make sense because they provide the numbers and information that the reader needs to create educated opinion on the
