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As the good news about a Covid-19 vaccine brings a wave of optimism, public distrust of immunization could make the most effective of products useless, warns the head of WHO’s immunization division.
“A vaccine that stays in a freezer or refrigerator or on a shelf and is not used does nothing to stop this pandemic,” Katherine O’Brien told AFP in a videoconference interview Friday.
On Monday, American Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech announced that their vaccine was 90% effective, according to preliminary results from their phase III vaccine tested on more than 40,000 people.
Professor O’Brien found these results, even preliminary ones, to be “extremely important” and said she hoped that data from several other vaccines, even in the last phase of human testing, would follow soon.
If the comprehensive data shows that “one or more of these vaccines are very, very effective, it would be good news to equip our toolbox with a new pandemic tool,” he stressed.
But she is deeply concerned about the misinformation and conspiracy theories that are increasing the ranks of anti-vaccines as the pandemic is far from under control and has already claimed nearly 1.3 million deaths.
It is necessary to increase “the confidence that WHO will not make any concessions on the safety or efficacy of the vaccines it is evaluating”.
– Gigantic Logistics Challenge –
Dr. O’Brien acknowledged that a number of important unknowns remained regarding vaccine candidates, such as the duration of protection they will be able to offer and perhaps equally important the big question: “This changes – is there a chance you could transmit (the disease) to someone else? “.
WHO is counting on the arrival of these vaccines in the coming months, but is preparing without delay for the gigantic logistical challenge of inoculating billions of people as quickly as possible.
Meanwhile, WHO has developed recommendations for giving the first vaccines to those who need them most.
“The goal is for each country to be able to immunize 20% of its population by the end of 2021, which would really help to meet the needs of health workers and populations with top priority, therefore, such as supply will continue to increase, we expect to receive many more doses in 2022, “explains Katherine O’Brien.
Access will also depend on the ability to manufacture vaccines in astronomical quantities, to package them, to transport them at times while keeping them frozen at very low temperatures and therefore to find sufficient staff to inject them.
“A highly effective, safe and manufacturable vaccine is of public health value only if it actually reaches the people it is meant to protect and if it is used extensively by the populations. This is the next challenge. That awaits us,” he said.
“I recently heard an analogy that proving the efficacy and safety (of a vaccine) is like setting up a base camp at the foot of Everest.
“But actually, to get vaccines to have a real impact, it’s at the distribution level that you play and that means climbing Everest,” said Katherine O’Brien.
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