Covid forever? Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna CEO believes that the virus will not go away and remain present in people’s lives.
Health authorities and infectious disease experts previously warned that it is likely that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, meaning it will remain present in communities, though likely at lower levels than it is currently.
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Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel echoed that sentiment, saying “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away.”
“We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” he told a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.
He believes that health experts will have to continuously monitor new Covid variants, so scientists can manufacture vaccines to fight them. Researchers in Ohio announced that they discovered two new variants likely coming from the U.S. and that one of them turned out to be the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-week period in late December and early January.
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Meanwhile, Pfizer researchers said the vaccine it produced with BioNTech is effective against a key mutation in the U.K. and South Africa variants.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved Moderna’s vaccine for use in Americans who are 18 years old and older. Further studies are required to be held for children whose immune systems may show a different response to vaccines than those of adults.
U.S. officials are aiming to administer doses of both vaccines, but it will likely take months before the country can inoculate enough people to reach herd immunity, meaning the virus would not find new hosts to spread. Still, Bancel expects the U.S. will be one of the first countries to achieve “sufficient protection” against the coronavirus.
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Covid infection provides immunity for at least five months, according to a new study led by Public Health England (PHE).
However, researchers stressed that the protection was not absolute, meaning some individuals can be infected again and that how long any immunity lasts remains uncertain. People who have a degree of immunity against the virus could still carry the virus in their nose or throat and infect others.
“We now know that most of those who have had the virus, and developed antibodies, are protected from reinfection, but this is not total and we do not yet know how long protection lasts,” Susan Hopkins, senior medical adviser at PHE and co-leader of the study, said in a statement.
“Even if you believe you already had the disease and are protected, you can be reassured it is highly unlikely you will develop severe infections. But there is still a risk you could acquire an infection and transmit (it) to others,” Hopkins said.
In November 2019, a study from Oxford University showed that Covid reinfection for people who had the virus is not likely to happen for at least six months.
The researchers worked on the study in a 30-week period between April and November with 12,180 health-care workers at Oxford University Hospitals.
The participants were tested for antibodies to the virus that brings Covid-19 as a way of identifying who had previously been infected. They underwent testing for Covid-19 when they manifested symptoms and as part of regular testing.
According to the study, 89 of 11,052 employees without antibodies showed a new infection with symptoms. None of the 1,246 staff with antibodies had a symptomatic infection. Staff with antibodies were less likely to test positive for the coronavirus without symptoms.
“This is really good news, because we can be confident that, at least in the short term, most people who get COVID-19 won’t get it again,” said professor David Eyre of the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health.
