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WHO Principal Investigator Dr Soumya Swaminathan said that medical sector workers, key sectors and the elderly would be the first to receive the vaccine, but that the WHO and its advisory groups had not yet established the details of the vaccine. priorities. And of course, a vaccine for the new coronavirus must first be declared safe and effective by the WHO, the European Union, or the United States.
“People tend to think that they will get vaccinated on January 1 or April 1, and then things will go back to normal. It won’t work like that,” Swaminathan said. He added that the world is expected to have at least one safe and effective vaccine by 2021, but it will be available in “limited quantities.”
The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, or SAGE, has recently published national guidelines on how to prioritize different groups of people.
More than 10 coronavirus vaccines around the world are in final-stage clinical trials, Swaminathan said, adding that since different vaccines may be approved for distribution, SAGE will publish population guidelines for which vaccine is most suitable. and how to distribute it.
“Most people agree that it will start with healthcare workers and front-line workers, but even then you need to define which of them is most at risk and then the elderly, etc.” Swaminathan said. “There will be a lot of counseling, but I think an ordinary person, a healthy young man, might have to wait until 2022 to receive a vaccine.”
Like WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are preparing to prioritize certain communities at risk of vaccine distribution.
But the situation in the United States will likely be very different from that of the WHO. The United States has independently obtained hundreds of millions of vaccine doses from six vaccine development companies. Senior US health officials said the country could have enough doses to vaccinate all Americans by spring 2021, with a limited distribution possible to priority groups later this year.
Senior WHO officials have warned nations not to provide doses of vaccines to their own citizens, as the United States and China have, what WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called “vaccine nationalism.” . Instead, the WHO launched the COVAX program to ensure equitable access to the supply of vaccine doses around the world.
More than 170 countries, including China and the United Kingdom, have invested in the program, which spreads the potential risks and benefits of vaccine development among its members. “We need to make sure we vaccinate those most at risk in each country before vaccinating everyone in a few countries,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, head of WHO’s Division of Emerging Diseases and Zoonoses, said Wednesday.
Any vaccine distribution plan is, of course, conditional on a vaccine that is safe and effective. The WHO comments come days after Johnson & Johnson announced a hiatus in the final study of a vaccine, for safety reasons. And a final phase clinical trial of AstraZeneca in the United States is pending, after it was stopped last month after a severe adverse reaction in a patient enrolled in the research. Such interruptions in clinical trials are not uncommon, health officials say, and indicate that regulators are taking appropriate safety measures in vaccine development.
