There is no guarantee that the coronavirus vaccine is actually going to be effective, according to White House task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Scientists from different countries race to develop a coronavirus vaccine. However, Dr. Fauci said that there are still many unknowns.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases presented his statements on Tuesday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Dr. Fauci testified during a hearing about reopening businesses in the US.
US officials often stress vaccine development as a critical turning point in the coronavirus pandemic. Experts say developing a vaccine will take at least 12 to 18 months.
The vaccines will undergo different processes, such as mass production and distribution to the more than 7.6 billion people around the world. There are no proven treatments for the virus yet at the moment.
Dr. Fauci’s remarks reveal more complexities in the process of developing a vaccine.
“You can have everything you think that’s in place and you don’t induce the kind of immune response that turns out to be protective and durably protective,” Fauci said of a vaccine.
“So one of the big unknowns is, will it be effective? Given the way the body responds to viruses of this type, I’m cautiously optimistic that we will with one of the candidates get an efficacy signal.”
Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health, an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, has been accelerating work with biotech company Moderna to come up with a coronavirus vaccine.
The World Health Organization announced that more than 100 vaccines are in the works worldwide as of April 30. At least eight potential vaccines are already in human trials.
Moderna is working on its phase one trial. The company’s potential vaccine features genetic material called messenger RNA, or mRNA. Moderna announced that it is entering the second phase with 600 participants. It was also finalizing plans for a late-stage trial as early as this summer.
Suboptimal response
Until a coronavirus vaccine is ready, Dr. Fauci said, the country must work on curbing the spread of the virus.
Dr. Fauci also emphasized that epidemiologists are concerned about the potential of a vaccine to strengthen the virus.
Two vaccines previously produced a “suboptimal response,” he said. “And when the person gets exposed, they actually have an enhanced pathogenesis of the disease, which is always worrisome. So we want to make sure that that doesn’t happen. Those are the two major unknowns.”
Moreover, Fauci said he’s “cautiously optimistic that we will have a candidate that will have some degree of efficacy, hopefully a percentage enough that will induce the kind of herd immunity that would give protection to the population at home.”
Multiple outbreaks
On Monday evening, Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times reported that Dr. Fauci sent her an email about what he would tell Congress during the hearing.
“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” Fauci wrote in the email, which Stolberg published on Twitter.
“If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal,” wrote Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
