Moncef Slaoui has not started making plans for his summer vacation next year. But he offers a high chance that all Americans will be able to do so in the not-too-distant future.
In an interview with some sympathetic podcasters at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Slaoui offers an education to listeners on how each medication or vaccine can be distributed through trials. And he leaves the door wide open for the idea that the leading fax developers can demonstrate efficiency and security in a compelling way since October – or as late as the end of this year.
But Slaoui says he is fairly confident that, based on what he now knows, there is good reason to hope that faxes will be available in sufficient numbers to cover all at-risk populations in the US – up to 40 million people – by the end of February. And he is looking for various facsimiles to cross the finish line so that experts can choose which ones are most likely to work based on demographics and risk.
Slaoui’s position on this will be closely followed. He ended a 30-year stint at GSK as chairman of the vaccine group, topping it off with the highly successful Shingrix program. With his move to OWS, Slaoui skipped his stakes in Moderna – jumping from the board of one of the leading fax developers to OWS – but retaining his GSK portfolio, which solves some criticism that he still clearly has deep resentment about.
For critics, it’s all food for discussion, as everyone focuses on the very potent topic of whether President Trump will force a fax announcement – which reiterates a successful pivotal test – in time to influence the election. . And like any expert in government, from FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn to NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, Slaoui says science will be all that matters.
Drawn from a transcript of the call, here Slaoui describes in detail how fax development is done:
We are conducting huge trials because they allow us to achieve efficiency faster, not because there is an election, because thousands of people are dying every day. And the data will be defined by the number of cases. There is no date. It’s impossible to give you a date. I was asked about dates, and I felt no pressure to say that data will define the date. If we have the number of required cases and then we have an independent data security oversight independent of the data and says we have to keep going, we have to stop because this does not work, or we have to stop because this also works well , it is unethical to continue, we must now start giving the vaccine to the placebo arm in the trial and to other people to consider, then that will be the end. That the end of the wire is completely independent of the action as someone involved in the operation. There are actually great academic experts, whose names are not known to the public who are looking for that data. And this is how all clinical trials are always done. That’s how clinical trials are done.
So when will we know?
That the data will dictate, the facts dictate. We may have the end point in October. We may have it in November 4th, who knows? We may have it in December 15th. That is the answer, and to be honest, on a personal basis, I would immediately resign if I was forced to do something that I thought would not be appropriate.
From the podcasters: What is your timeline? Or what is your thought on it?
I hope that in the first two months of 2021 we will have enough doses of vaccines to immunize the endangered populations in the US, vaccines that could have shown effectiveness and been independently approved by the FDA. And I’m talking about maybe the 30 to 40 million most sensitive people in the US in maybe, December, January, February.
And then and I think that that should reduce the burden of this disease for society in general dramatically. Because, as you know, most of the burden of the disease lies on a high-risk population. Plus the secondary effect of overwhelm hospital systems, et cetera, which for other reasons affects other populations. And I think, from this, it will be a slow process that will be a balance between the benefits / risks that the vaccines will have shown and the risk of certain subpopulation.
For example, honestly, immunizing the pediatric population, toddlers, et cetera, will have to be something that has to be really far away, because they are 70 or 80 years old to live. And we are probably needed there to use platform technologies that are well understood in the long run, such as on protein-based vaccines, et cetera. We are fortunate that most in this population the disease burden is very, very low. And so, I guess there will be a lot of views. But probably between the first quarter and the second quarter of 2021 will have been the most hopeful population, I hope, immunized. And life I would expect … I hope next summer I can have a vacation, normal vacation.
Whatever happens to his vacation plans, one thing seems certain. Millions of people will argue about the timeline for development until the election decisions.
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