Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last three decades and an expert on pandemics for the last four decades, has been waiting for recent news that Russia has developed a vaccine, and is ready to start inoculating people with it.
“We have half a dozen or more faxes, so if we wanted the chance to hurt a lot of people or give them something that doesn’t work, we could start this, you know, new week if we wanted to, but that’s it. not the way it works, ”Fauci told ABC News in an interview late Tuesday.
“Having a vaccine and proving that a vaccine is safe and effective are two different things,” he told the ABC DIS,
Deborah Roberts. He said people should understand that when they hear announcements from the Chinese or the Russians that we have a fax machine.
“I hope the Russians have, in fact, definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective,” Fauci said. “I seriously doubt they did.” He added, “We have a way of doing things in this country where we care about security and we care about efficiency.”
Russian officials have compared the registration of the vaccine to the “Star Wars” space race during the Cold War. In fact, Russian President Vladimir Putin said one of his daughters had already received a dose of the vaccine, which was named Sputnik-V.
Fauci has meanwhile been optimistic about a vaccine arriving at the end of 2020 as early as 2021, but he has also warned the public about their expectations for the effectiveness of each vaccine being developed. Most scientists say it takes at least a year to develop a safe vaccine.
Fauci said earlier that he hoped a coronavirus vaccine could be developed in early 2021, but he said it was unlikely a vaccine would provide 100% immunity; he said the best realistic outcome, based on other faxes, would be 70% to 75% effective.
AstraZeneca AZN,
in combination with Oxford University, BioNTech SE BNTX,
and partner Pfizer PFE,
GlaxoSmithKline GSK,
Johnson & Johnson JNJ,
Merck & Co. NOTE,
Modern MRNA,
and Sanofi SAN,
among others, are currently working on COVID-19 fax machines.
“What I’m shooting is that, with a vaccine and good public health measures, we can get it somewhere between really good control and elimination,” he told Abdullah Shihipar, a public health associate at Brown University, in a recent interview.
Previous studies have found that, on average, the flu vaccine is approximately 50% to 60% effective for healthy adults aged 18 to 64 years. “The vaccine can sometimes be less effective,” it said. “Even if the vaccine does not completely prevent the flu, it can reduce the severity of your illness.”
Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said last month that the agency would give a vaccine for coronavirus green light as long as it is 50% effective. “We all want a vaccine tomorrow, which is unrealistic,” he said.
The US has the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world (5,190,948) and deaths (165,883), followed by Brazil (103,026), Mexico (53,929) and the United Kingdom (46,791). As of Wednesday, there are 20,452,313 confirmed cases of coronavirus worldwide and 745,600 deaths.
The Dow Jones Industrial Index DJIA,
S&P 500 SPX,
and Nasdaq Composite COMP,
Wednesday closed higher as investors awaited progress on round two of a fiscal stimulus during the coronavirus pandemic.
In the absence of a vaccine, health experts say social distance and masks are the only alternative as “herd immunity” – where those who are immune protect the most vulnerable in the population – is not possible for coronavirus. This requires a very high level of population immunity.
.
