Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Work and Pensions (HELP) hearing at Capitol Hill in Washington DC on June 30, 2020 in Washington, DC .
Kevin Dietsch | AFP via Getty Images
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a White House coronavirus advisor, said Friday that a coronavirus vaccine will likely not be “widely available” to the American public until “several months” in 2021.
Public health officials and scientists hope to know if at least one of the numerous possible Covid-19 vaccines in development is safe and effective by the end of December or early next year, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said during One lives Q&A with the Washington Post.
“It is likely that early next year we will have tens of millions of doses available,” Fauci said, adding that some drug manufacturers have forecast more doses than that. “I think as we enter 2021, several months later, that you would have vaccines that would be widely available.”
Health officials say there is no return to “normal” until there is a vaccine. There are no FDA-approved drugs or vaccines for the coronavirus, which has infected more than 15 million people worldwide and has killed at least 633,656 as of Friday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. According to the World Health Organization, more than 150 possible vaccines are being developed worldwide, with at least 25 already in human trials. The modern biotech firm, which is working with the National Institutes of Health, released promising data on its possible vaccine last week and is expected to enter a late-stage trial next week.
Although scientists hope to have an effective vaccine widely available by next year, there is never a guarantee. While drug manufacturers are competing to produce millions of doses of vaccines, there is a possibility that the vaccine may require two doses instead of one, which could further limit the number of people who can be vaccinated once the vaccine is in place. available, experts say.
Furthermore, scientists say questions remain about how the human body responds once it has been infected with the virus. They say the answers may have important implications for vaccine development, including how quickly it can be deployed to the public.
A critical question among scientists is whether the antibodies produced in response to Covid-19 offer protection against infection again.
Scientists hope that the antibodies offer some degree of protection against Covid-19, but they can’t say it definitively since the virus was discovered just six months ago. It has not been studied in depth and some patients appear to have been reinfected after recovering from Covid-19.
A recent study published in Nature Medicine found that antibodies to the coronavirus can last only two to three months after a person becomes infected with Covid-19. The researchers examined 37 asymptomatic people who were infected but never developed symptoms in Wanzhou Chinese District. They compared their antibody response to that of 37 people with symptoms.
Fauci addressed the antibodies on Friday, saying it is an area where “we need to get more information.” In addition to antibodies, there may be other aspects of the immune response, such as T cells, that may play a role in protecting against the virus, he added.
“We are only six months away from the outbreak,” he said. “Since we’ve only been six months, we don’t know how long [antibodies] last in most people. But the fact is … there are some people where the antibodies only last for a short period of time. We need to know what that means. “
“Again, we are learning as the weeks and months go by, but we don’t have all the information we need,” he said.
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