New Delhi, October 2
An effective vaccine is not likely to be available to the general public before fall 2021, according to experts working in the field of vaccine development.
Researchers from McGill University in Canada conducted a survey of 28 experts working in vaccinology in late June 2020.
The majority of respondents were mostly Canadian or American academics with an average of 25 years of experience working in the field.
“Experts in our survey provided vaccine development forecasts that were generally less optimistic than the early 2021 schedule offered by US public officials,” said Jonathan Kimmelman, a professor at McGill University, in a statement. .
“Overall, they seem to believe that a publicly available vaccine next summer is the best case, with the possibility that it will be needed until 2022,” said Kimmelman, lead author of the article published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
Many experts also believe that there may be some false starts before an effective vaccine is available.
“The experts we surveyed believe that there is a one in three chance that the vaccine will receive a safety warning label after approval, and a four in ten chance that the first large field study will not report efficacy.” added Patrick Kane, lead author of the paper, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University.
The study also showed that about a third of those surveyed believe that vaccine development is likely to face two main setbacks.
The first widely implemented vaccine in the US and / or Canada will receive a boxed warning from the FDA to highlight serious or life-threatening adverse reactions, the researchers said.
Also, the first large field test in the US and / or Canada would report a null or negative result in terms of efficacy, they said.
“Our study finds that experts are largely in agreement on the timing of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine,” said Stephen Broomell, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States.
“While this does not correspond to many overly optimistic government projections, it reflects the belief that researchers are in fact at a faster rate of development compared to previous vaccines,” Broomell said in a statement. PTI
