This week, U.S. healthcare workers began receiving the first doses of Pfizer s COVID-19 vaccine and we almost certainly have monkeys to thank for that.
Monkeys and other nonhuman test subjects have been an extremely valuable research component in helping the medical community better understand COVID, which has so far killed 290,000 people in the U.S. and more than 19,000 in Florida. In two peer-reviewed studies published this spring in
Science magazine, researchers who infected groups of rhesus macaque monkeys with the coronavirus found that primates were capable of developing protective immunity against the disease. That development helped pave the way for the vaccines that could start to put an end to the pandemic.