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The organization’s chief scientist explained that it normally takes ten years to develop a vaccine and that the speed record is now around four years.
If the covid-19 vaccines that are in the last stage of development are successful, about 70% of the world’s population should be immunized to ensure the end of the pandemic, the chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO), Soumya Swaminathan.
While it remains to be seen how effective future vaccines will be, Swaminathan and WHO director of immunization, Kate O’Brien, estimate that this would be the ideal percentage, although the goal by 2021 is to reach 20%.
“No company that is investigating will be able to have immediate doses for everyone,” warned O’Brien, who indicated that it is important for this reason that all laboratories continue their investigations even if one of them is ahead of the others.
In a meeting with internet users to review the new and promising vaccine advances that were reported this week in the US and Russia, the two experts stressed that new technologies being developed in the current fight against COVID “can help better protect us from future pandemics “. .
Efficacy studies
In this sense, technologies such as Messenger RNA (mRNA), used in Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna candidate vaccines, and which instead of the usual use of weakened forms of viruses, use molecules that instruct the human body about how to build antibodies were alluded to. .
Swaminathan stressed on the news of the 90% efficacy in clinical trials of the German-American Pfizer-BioNTech project that these are preliminary results and “more data is needed” until it is guaranteed that it can be licensed for the production.
Even if the hypothetical vaccines finally become available to the general public, WHO experts insisted that the first to be immunized must be healthcare professionals and people belonging to risk groups, such as the elderly or patients with certain diseases.
O’Brien particularly insisted that the first vaccines that could arrive in the first few months, when there is greater demand than supply, should not be stored and warned countries against building large stocks of them.
“The smart and correct thing is to make sure they get those who need it most,” he said, adding that in those early moments “a vaccine in the fridge won’t do anyone.”
Distribution and conservation
When asked about the distribution problems that vaccines developed with mRNA technology could entail, which must be stored at temperatures close to 80 degrees below zero, experts indicated that this would be a challenge but technologies such as so-called “dry ice” already exist. which can help.
They also pointed out that previously there were vaccines that required storage at such low temperatures, such as Ebola, so storage and distribution chains have been tested on a limited basis in some parts of the world.
More than 200 laboratories around the world are researching vaccines against covid-19, a disease of which there have been more than 50 million confirmed cases worldwide, and of these projects, around 40 are in clinical trials on the ‘man.
Of these, a dozen candidate vaccines from countries such as China, the United States, Russia or the United Kingdom are in their latest phase, in which tens of thousands are already tested and their results are compared with those of other large subject groups in the test that was given a placebo.
Swaminathan explained that it normally takes ten years to develop a vaccine and that the speed record is now around four and a half years, but the fact that such a large section of the international scientific community has joined in this research could help this. time is much smaller.
O’Brien added that the WHO needs about $ 20 billion for its Covax platform, intended to fund some laboratories in exchange for fair distribution of the vaccine in developing countries.
“Even though it sounds like a lot of money, what is lost every ten days in trade and tourism around the world now amounts to about $ 35 billion,” the Canadian expert compared.
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