The success of Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine trial may help persuade more people to get vaccinated amid a surge in new coronavirus cases, according to Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease physician.
The Pfizer vaccine, developed in collaboration with BioNTech SE of Germany, has “an extraordinarily high degree of efficacy: more than 90 percent, about 95 percent,” Fauci said in an interview. That could be a key factor in overcoming the reluctance to take full-throttle vaccines against the pandemic.
“What I hope is that, although there is a certain degree of skepticism about vaccines in general, when the general public sees how effective this vaccine is,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, “we could see a change of attitude towards vaccination ”.
The United States may begin offering the vaccine to priority groups in late December, Fauci said. It is expected to mitigate the rising infections that reached a record 190,000 new cases daily this week. The Trump administration has bought and funded dosage development from Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies with the goal of producing enough supplies for most Americans by the end of the year.
The name of the administration’s effort, Operation Warp Speed, may have created the impression that corners are being cut to create a vaccine, undermining public confidence, researchers such as Paul Offit, director of the Center for Vaccine Education, have said. from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. .
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Just over half of American adults said in September that they would definitely or likely take a vaccine to prevent Covid-19 if it were available, compared with 72 percent in May, a national survey by the Pew Research Center based in America showed. Washington. A June survey of people in 19 countries published last month in the journal Science found that 71.5 percent of participants would likely take a Covid-19 vaccine, with acceptance ranging from nearly 90 percent in China. and less than 55 percent in Russia.
Results from a late-stage trial of a candidate vaccine from Moderna Inc. that uses the same messenger RNA technology as the Pfizer injection will likely be available within a week, Fauci said. “And if that is really comparable to what we saw with the Pfizer trial, now we will have two highly effective vaccines,” he said.
“We have to convince people to get vaccinated, because if you have a very effective vaccine and only 50 percent of people apply it, you are not going to have the impact that you would need to essentially get a pandemic at such a low level that it no longer threatens society, ”Fauci said. “And that is the goal of a vaccine.”
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The vaccines developed by Pfizer / BioNTech SE and Moderna are administered in a two-injection regimen. The duration of their protection, or that of any Covid-19 vaccine, is not yet known, Fauci said. Coronaviruses generally don’t elicit an immune response that lasts for decades, and people are infected with one or more of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold year after year, he said.
If the effect of the vaccine has “one or two years of durability, for me it is fine, because we just go back and strengthen people and increase immunity,” Fauci said.
More than 20 Covid vaccines have entered the final stage of patient studies that new pharmaceuticals generally must undergo regulatory approval. Although late-stage trials can take only a few months, participants and others receiving experimental vaccines will be followed for up to two years as part of safety monitoring and surveillance, Fauci said.
“You must always be very careful when it comes to safety when it comes to vaccines that will be administered to hundreds of millions, if not billions of people,” he said. “And that is something that is in the foreground of all. Safety is paramount. “
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