Foremost Vaccine Experts Said Life May Get Back To Normal By Summer As More Good News About Vaccines Against Covid-19 Emerges.
Dr Richard Hatchett, chief executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), an organisation that funds vaccine development, told an online event hosted by the Telegraph, that the news that two vaccines were effective was “tremendously exciting”.
On Monday, US biotech Moderna announced that its vaccine was 95 per cent effective: news that came hot on the heels of an announcement by German pharmaceutical firm Pfizer the previous week that its vaccine also worked well.
More data published by Pfizer on Wednesday showed that its jab generated a good immune response in older people – a crucial group to protect. And on Thursday, researchers behind the Oxford University/Astra Zeneca vaccine announced Phase II trial results that also showed effectiveness in older adults.
Dr Hatchett said the rapid development of the vaccines meant life could return to some kind of normal by the summer. “What we’ve got right now are extraordinary Phase III clinical trial results. What we don’t have is a lot of vaccine that has been licensed and is ready to go out to everybody. But that’s almost certainly going to come pretty soon,” he said. He added that people in the UK are likely to be among the first in line for a jab.
“I would say that in the UK, particularly if other vaccines such as the Astra Zeneca vaccine show the same level of effectiveness and safety, life will get back to normal in the summer.” The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are based on brand new mRNA technology, creating a whole new class of vaccine. Dr Hatchett said that while this is exciting in itself it is also good for the other, more traditionally developed vaccines. “The part of the Covid-19 virus that they’re targeting is also the same part that many other vaccines are targeting,” he said. But he added that there were challenges ahead in terms of the distribution and manufacture of the vaccines – particularly the Pfizer vaccine which needs to be kept at minus 70 degrees. “Many observers have said that vaccines don’t save lives, vaccinations do and the challenges ahead of us in scaling up the production of these vaccines and getting them out to people are going to be immense. And we cannot underestimate those challenges,” he said.
World’s Foremost Vaccine Experts Said Life May Get Back To Normal By Summer As More Good News About Vaccines Against Covid-19 Emerges. Dr Hatchett also told the online event, which was organised in partnership with drug firm Gilead, that the speed at which the vaccines had been developed – 300 days versus the usual timeline of 10 years – did not mean that safety had been compromised. Dr Hatchett said that the manufacturing and clinical trial timelines had been “squeezed” and the researchers had managed to recruit a huge number of people very quickly.
“You have to look at a certain number of cases of the disease before you look at results. Of course, we’re in the middle of a pandemic where disease rates are very high and these cases have accumulated very rapidly. “Everything that would be done to ensure safety has been done with these vaccines – it’s just happened in a very compressed timeframe,” he said.
While vaccines may have been developed at warp speed there has also been work on treatments. Dr Mike Elliott, vice president for medical affairs at Gilead Science, said his company’s remdesivir antiviral treatment had also shown promise. While a World Health Organization trial has shown that the drug is not effective in the later stages, other studies have shown that it can reduce treatment times if administered early on. “It can reduce times by five days and those five days are really important to the patients and their loved ones. They’re also important to the hospital who can free up intensive care beds,” he said. Gilead has a library of molecules which researchers scanned to work out which would be most effective against Covid-19 – remdesivir was the only one that stood out.
Other treatments include dexamethasone, a steroid which has been shown in clinical trials to reduce mortality in patients in intensive care by about a third, and monoclonal antibodies which are being trialled but for which no independent data is available yet.
Dr Elliott said more treatments were likely to come out in the new year. “The pace of research is phenomenal so I think we’ll get some data read outs early next year,” he said. Care has also improved in terms of when to put patients on ventilators or oxygen, said Dr Elliott. “Colleagues in intensive care have learned a lot about the total care of the patient, how to position them to support breathing, when to use oxygen – early on – and when to consider a ventilator, probably later. Intensive care teams have done phenomenal work around the world in an extraordinarily stressful situation,” he said.
This news was originally published at Telegraph