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GENEVA / ZURICH – The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday (October 14) that healthy young people may have to wait until 2022 to get vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus, as it warned against complacency in the rate of mortality from disease.
Despite the global push for a Covid-19 vaccine, with dozens in clinical trials and hopes for initial inoculations this year, WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan reiterated that rapid mass injections were unlikely, Reuters reported.
Two candidates, from the US trial of Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, are on hiatus for safety concerns, while manufacturing billions of doses of an eventually successful vaccine will be a colossal challenge that will require tough decisions about who gets vaccinated first.
“People tend to think that on the first of January or the first of April they will give me the vaccine and then things will go back to normal,” Dr. Swaminathan said during a WHO event on social media.
“It’s not going to work like that.”
He added that he hoped the world would have at least one safe and effective vaccine by 2021, but that it would be available only in “limited quantities.”
“Most people agree, it’s starting with healthcare workers and frontline workers, but even there, you need to define which of them are most at risk, and then the elderly, and so on,” Dr. Swaminathan said.
“There will be a lot of counseling, but I think the average person, a healthy young person, might have to wait until 2022 to get a vaccine.”
The WHO has said that allowing the infection to spread in the hope of achieving “herd immunity” is unethical and would cause unnecessary deaths.
It urges hand washing, social distancing, masks and, where unavoidable, limited and specific restrictions on movement, to control the spread of the disease.
“People talk about herd immunity. We should only talk about it in the context of a vaccine,” Dr. Swaminathan said, quoted by Reuters.
“You need to vaccinate at least 70 percent of people … to really break transmission.”
New cases reach 100,000 daily in Europe. Nearly 20,000 infections were reported in Britain, while Italy, Switzerland and Russia were among the nations with record numbers of cases.
While deaths worldwide have dropped to around 5,000 a day since the April peak that topped 7,500, Dr. Swaminathan said the number of cases was increasing in intensive care units, Reuters reported.
“The mortality increases always lag behind the increase in cases by a couple of weeks,” said Dr. Swaminathan.
“We should not be satisfied that death rates are going down.”
More than 38 million people have been infected worldwide and 1.1 million have died.
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