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NEW YORK: As the world celebrates the advances in vaccines against the new coronavirus, a leading expert from the World Health Organization (WHO) warned in an interview with Agence France-Presse that public mistrust ran the risk of rendering even treatments useless more effective against the pandemic.
“A vaccine that is placed in a freezer or in a refrigerator or on a shelf and not used does nothing to help shorten this pandemic,” said Kate O’Brien, director of the WHO immunization department.
US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced Monday that their potential vaccine had shown 90 percent efficacy in preventing Covid-19 infections in ongoing end-phase trials involving more than 40,000 people.
O’Brien praised the interim results as “extremely important” and expressed hope that preliminary data for a handful of other vaccine candidates in equally advanced trials will be obtained soon.
If the full data shows that “one or more of these vaccines has very, very substantial efficacy, that’s really good news to put another tool in the toolbox” to fight the pandemic, he said.
But with the pandemic continuing to escalate after around 1.3 million lives have already been claimed, he expressed deep concern over growing signs of vacillation in vaccines, with misinformation and mistrust staining the acceptance of scientific advances by people.
“We are not going to be successful as a world in controlling the pandemic with the use of vaccines as one of the tools unless people are willing to get vaccinated,” O’Brien said.
More needs to be done to increase “public confidence that the vaccines the WHO is evaluating will not compromise safety or efficacy,” he said.
O’Brien acknowledged that there were a number of outstanding questions about the candidate vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech and its peers, including the duration of protection against the virus.
And while vaccine candidates are being tested to determine how effectively and safely they protect people against developing the disease, it is not clear whether they actually prevent asymptomatic infection and transmission of the virus.
A big question, he said, is, “Does your likelihood of transmitting to someone else change?” Despite outstanding questions, WHO is betting that one or more vaccines will get approval soon, followed by a rapid expansion of production and distribution.
Anticipating the huge demand for any approved vaccine, the UN health agency has helped create the so-called Covax facility to ensure equitable distribution.
But even with gigantic efforts, it will be a while before there are enough doses for everyone, and the WHO has set guidelines on how to prioritize distribution.
“The goal here is for all countries to be able to immunize 20 percent of their population by the end of 2021,” O’Brien said.
That, he said, would go a long way toward providing protection to healthcare workers and the most vulnerable populations, as well as people essential to keeping societies running, such as teachers.
After that, how quickly everyone else can access a vaccine will largely depend on the country they live in and whether their government has made agreements to access vaccines that get approved.
“We would expect many more doses in 2022,” O’Brien said.
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