Abacus | Forget vaccines. Copper kills coronaviruses and China’s cornered the market

Exterminating Covid-19 will be a profitable business, but the pharmaceutical industry isn’t necessarily the winner of the race

Copper and its alloys may be ready to shine in saving us from years of this global scourge

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Workers move batches of copper sheets in Mufulira, Zambia. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 8:00am, 19 Oct 2020Updated: 8:36am, 19 Oct 2020

WACKY RACES

If politics wasn’t racy enough right now with a space race, an arms race and a tech race taking place between the Chinese and the Americans in a US election year, there is a vaccine race going on as well. It usually takes around four years to develop and test a vaccine – well, the ones that work anyway. But such is the acute demand and potential financial gain to be had with the first Covid-19 jab that every superpower and major economy is going at full pelt to develop it. And nations without the resources to develop one are willing to be guinea pigs to secure a supply and hopefully benefit from the economic boost of an early recovery.

I am sceptical that this will work, and if equity markets start to price in a sure-fire vaccine I will probably run for the hills. Even if the brightest minds in the industry find a vaccine that works on a particular strain of the coronavirus, there’s no guarantee that it will effectively eliminate the various strands that are emerging. Think, for example, of the annual flu jab. It’s a cocktail of 15 vaccines that have been selected to combat the strands of the flu that are statistically most likely to spread far and wide in a given flu season. If the coronavirus ends up being as adept at evolving and evading vaccines as the flu is each year, we may never get completely rid of it.

An engineer in a laboratory built to produce a Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine at Sinovac in China. Photo: AFP

A VACCINE FOR THE DASTARDLY COVID-19

The optimistic take is that although the press has been talking up a vaccine for a while, it’s still really early days. A few are now in the final stages of clinical trials, and many more are being planned. As we head into winter with the expectation that the northern hemisphere will be subject to another wave – as Britain is currently – the attention on vaccines and various “cures” will heighten still.