UCI’s Infectious Diseases Chief Discusses COVID-19 Vaccines Three Questions With Dr. Donald Forthal Steve Zylius / UCI
The first vaccine was developed in 1796 by British physician and scientist Edward Jenner, after he had intuited that dairy workers’ resistance to smallpox resulted from their exposure to the much milder cowpox. (Jenner derived his term “vaccine” from vacca, the Latin word for cow.) It took scientists nearly another century to begin to understand that vaccines work in the human body by stimulating the formation of antibodies. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a worldwide effort led to the effective eradication of smallpox, which had plagued humankind for more than 3,000 years. While vaccines have made remarkable strides in recent decades, nothing compares with the accelerated development and testing of the two COVID-19 vaccines given emergency approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last year. On Dec. 16, 2020, just over a year after the global pandemic had quietly started in Wuhan, China, UCI Health received 3,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and began administering them to its healthcare workers, according to Centers for Disease
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Control and Prevention guidelines. The following week, 2,800 vials of the Moderna vaccine were also made available. Both vaccines require a second dose three or four weeks after the first. The goal is to ultimately inoculate some 15,000 UCI Health employees. “The priority is based on healthcare workers’ level and length of exposure to high-risk patients,” explains Dr. Donald Forthal, chief of the UCI School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases. (He has received both doses.) Forthal earned an M.D. at UCI in 1979 and worked at the CDC, the World Health Organization and elsewhere before returning to UCI in 1989 to teach and conduct research. Along with heading the infectious diseases division, he is a professor of medicine in UCI’s School of Medicine. He has a joint appointment in the Department of Molecular Biology & Biochemistry and is a member of both the Center for Virus Research and the Institute for Immunology. UCI Magazine contributing writer Jim Washburn spoke with Forthal in January about the science behind the vaccines – and their prospects.
