![]() ![]() “It is an exceptional situation and time frames are being shortened,” he said. SARS-CoV-2 is more stable, and Blanco is confident that the first vaccines will be ready to use in about a year’s time. But its research has taught us a lot about viruses in general,” Blanco said. Since it was discovered in 1983, we haven’t been able to find a vaccine. “HIV is a very complicated virus that mutates a lot. Knowledge acquired during the search for other vaccines, like the research being done to find an HIV vaccine, can be helpful with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. “Why we were not prepared for this pandemic? Because there hasn’t been enough funding to investigate SARS and MERS,” he told Al Jazeera.īlanco was referring to the s evere acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and t he Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) – two other types of coronavirus diseases that in recent years caused outbreaks, mainly in Asia and the Middle East. The collective has also signed an agreement with the National Federation for Rare Diseases, which will receive part of the donations.įunding is one of the main challenges when it comes to developing vaccines, said Julia Blanco, a scientist involved in COVID vaccine research at the IrsiCaixa AIDS Research Institute, which is linked to the Fight AIDS Foundation. That was when Fernandez and his colleagues reached out to the Fundacion Lucha contra el Sida (Fight AIDS Foundation), an institution that has been working against HIV/AIDS since 1992 and that launched research on a COVID-19 vaccine in January. In March, Spain was recording the second-highest number of new daily cases in the world, just after Italy, and the government imposed a strict lockdown that would endure for two months. Germany, Ireland, Austria, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have set no time limit for swapping them, while Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, and Malta banks no longer accept their former currencies. Luxembourg, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Slovenia and Slovakia still accept obsolete banknotes, but not coins. Spain is not the only euro country where old currencies can still be exchanged. The Bank of Spain estimates that Spaniards still have about 1.6 billion euros ($1.7bn) worth of pesetas lying around in drawers and storage units. ![]() In 2002, only a set of coins, featuring King Juan Carlos, were in circulation “On an individual basis, it doesn’t mean much for most of the people, it is just a memory, but if everything is collected together, a lot of people could be helped.” “It is money that would go to waste otherwise”, he said. “Before COVID-19, we were already looking for ideas to use those pesetas for a good cause,” Emilio Fernandez, one of the promoters of the idea, told Al Jazeera. The clock is ticking for exchanging those pesetas for euros: the Bank of Spain will only accept them until the end of 2020. “They were just worthless memories, but they can help a lot of people now,” Gonzalez told Al Jazeera. Gonzalez donated her obsolete money to the citizen initiative La ultima peseta (The Last Peseta), a campaign launched by a group of advertising specialists, called VIDA, to collect funds for COVID-19 vaccine research. Several weeks ago, she decided to dust off the old coins and notes and put them to better use. When the Spanish currency, the peseta, went out of circulation in 2002 to be replaced by the euro, Isabel Gonzalez, now 49, put aside 1,700 pesetas, or 10.2 euros ($11.8) to keep as a memory of the coins that had been a big part of her life. ![]()
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