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Experts warn that “it will probably only be noticed if the vaccine is having an effect on the large number of pandemics next winter.”
The impact of vaccination against the new coronavirus should only be felt in Portugal and in the world by the end of 2021, even if the first people are immunized at the beginning of the year, according to experts heard by the Lusa agency.
Before arriving, there must first be enough vaccines to inoculate approximately half the population and achieve the effect of group immunity, said Joaquim Ferreira, director of the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology at the João Lobo Antunes Institute of Molecular Medicine.
“In the best of cases, I would say that with the vaccination of risk groups during the first three months of the year and then all until July, August, things will only begin to change radically from the summer. ideally, they will return to a greater normality ”, predicted the professor of Neurology and Clinical Pharmacology of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon.
For the director of the Institute of Biochemistry of that faculty, Miguel Castanho, “it will probably only be noticed if the vaccine is affecting the large number of pandemics next winter.”
“Until then, it would be unwise for people to stop taking precautionary measures overnight. By the time 50% of the population is immunized, that will be the tipping point for the virus and the good point for us, when we will see essential substantive changes ”, he adds.
Miguel Castanho emphasizes that “it would not be wise to give the illusion or the expectation that this can be achieved before the end of 2021, because if everything goes as expected, perhaps the summer will pass in relative calm”, like this year, which will not it will allow to draw all the conclusions about the efficacy of vaccines.
For Joaquim Ferreira, the first people to be vaccinated are “certainly the risk groups: older people, older than 70 years, institutionalized, those with risk diseases.”
This will result, after about two months, in fewer hospitalizations for severe cases of covid-19, which mainly affect older people, fewer people in intensive care and fewer deaths.
“It will take time, even if the vaccine works, as we hope and as the results suggest, and we begin to decrease the risks of infection and the risk of serious diseases if people become infected. But that will not reduce the global numbers because most of the population will not be vaccinated yet ”, he stresses.
Along with the most vulnerable people, “health professionals, firefighters, military personnel, people vital to civic service” and then “all other healthy adults with hypertension, diabetes, which end up being a large swath, should follow from the population “.
“It will not be an overnight profit, but an incremental one, in months,” predicts Joaquim Ferreira.
Joaquim Ferreira points out that “the Portuguese are fantastic at adaptation but not always at planning, and if it is not planned well, access and distribution may suffer some setbacks”, a scenario that can be multiplied by more than two hundred countries throughout the world. world.
It is about “producing billions of vaccines in a short time”, a process that will take at least the entire next year, even with all laboratories producing intensively.
Everything should be faster than ever in history, but it is important “not to be naive from the point of view of access to basic health,” he considers.
“It is easy to see that the first populations to be vaccinated are going to be those of the countries of the laboratories where the vaccine will be produced, because distance will be an obstacle in its distribution,” says Joaquim Ferreira, highlighting that despite the selfishness of every country, “everyone is interested”.
“Europeans are interested in people living in Africa or Asia also getting vaccinated, because that allows for global control. For all of us to work again with healthy economies, we must all be able to acquire and produce things, otherwise we will continue very badly. “, he says.
Miguel Castanho points out “a factor that can complicate a lot”: at this moment it is unknown how long the immunity conferred by the vaccine will last. If, when we vaccinate the last people, the first have to be vaccinated again, this becomes a continuous operation and it will be very difficult to ensure global vaccination ”, he says.
The researcher suggests that “travel consultations” can be extended to many destinations because there will be areas of the globe where it will not be advisable to travel without vaccines, as is the case today for other diseases.
“We will probably add SARS-CoV-2 to the list of dangerous viruses in some areas of the globe, even if we are already talking about 2022 or 2023, this in an optimistic perspective,” says Miguel Castanho.
He also notes that vaccines at a more advanced stage, even with efficacy rates above 90%, all have “an Achilles heel: they all target the same structure of the virus and if it changes significantly, they can become obsolete.”
Miguel Castanho emphasizes that “there are other hopes besides the vaccine” to change the course of the pandemic, referring that there is an “obsessive look” on this tool and that, “in the political discourse, the vaccine was soon adopted as a form of try to reassure “. and transferring responsibility for solving “the problem from the political world to the scientific world.”
Among those hopes are drugs to treat COVID-19 patients and diagnostic tests, which “can, by themselves, greatly alter the face of the fight against the pandemic.”
“If each of us had a test at home that could be done as easily as a diabetic does with the blood glucose test, without the need for a health technician to do a swab, everyone would know at that point if they could get out. from home ”, he illustrated.
Joaquim Ferreira recognizes that “the risk of serious adverse effects is not null” and that only one will know more about what “the vaccine can induce when it begins to be administered to more people”, but considers it “unlikely to happen”.
“I am very excited. We have data, which has been shared [pelos fabricantes das vacinas mais adiantadas] or the scientific knowledge that has emerged from these months, which provides security. If vaccines are approved by the American and European pharmaceutical agencies, we have to move forward clearly, consciously, but available to participate in this movement, “he says.
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