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HEALTH-VIRUS-GAVI
COVID-19 vaccine not certain: global alliance Gavi
GENEVA, April 24, 2020 (BSS/AFP) – The race is on to produce a vaccine
against COVID-19 but it is not certain that one can be found, the head of the
global vaccines alliance said Friday.
Seth Berkley said the more competition the better in the scientific
fightback against the new coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly
200,000 people since it emerged in December.
The head of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance also said confidence in an eventual
COVID-19 vaccine would be greatly boosted if political leaders were seen
getting immunised, saying he was “quite disturbed” by highly-politicised
campaigns against vaccination.
“One of the challenges is we don’t know if we can make a vaccine,” Berkley
said at a virtual press briefing in Geneva.
“I’m quite optimistic, from what I know on the science — but we have no
proof of concept yet.”
While a vaccine might normally take 10 to 15 years to develop, Berkley
said the first vaccines against COVID-19 might be available in 12 to 18
months “if we’re really lucky”.
“You want initially the race for the vaccine. That competition is great,”
he said, explaining that rather than having dozens of vaccines being worked
on that eventually were identical, it was better to have varied ones that
acted differently.
There are currently over 100, and possibly up to 150 different vaccines in
various stages of development, he said.
– Vaccine hesitancy –
A growing anti-vaccine movement has helped spark measles outbreaks in many
richer countries in recent years.
The anti-vax phenomenon has adherents across Western countries but
especially in the United States, where it has been fuelled by the spread on
social media of medically baseless claims.
“Vaccine hesitancy relates to the fact that vaccines are so effective that
the diseases have disappeared” in countries where yellow fever, tetanus and
the like are “never seen”, Berkley said.
The social media rumour mill is also churning away during the current
pandemic, he said, adding that he was “quite disturbed about these very
politicised campaigns”.
But the pandemic might lead to more people trusting vaccination, he said.
Any vaccines that will emerge will be used globally, which would remove
discussions about anyone being used as “guinea pigs”, and skeptics may be
made more comfortable “if political leaders across the world and others are
getting it”.
He said the first group of people to be vaccinated should be healthcare
workers, followed by those in at-risk groups, such as people with heart
disease.
The elderly are at the highest risk of death from the virus, but he warned
that it was always harder to vaccinate them because their immune systems are
not as responsive as youngsters.
Gavi provides vaccines against a wide range of diseases for the 60 percent
of the world’s children who live in developing countries.
There must be needs-based global access to an eventual COVID-19 vaccine,
he said, to avoid the “risk of having the worried well gobble up all the
vaccines”.
He also warned that another pandemic down the line was “evolutionarily
certain”.
BSS/AFP/MRU/1850hrs