The World Health Organization or WHO clarifies a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine is not guaranteed despite candidates entering late-stage human trials.
“Phase three doesn’t mean nearly there,” Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said during a virtual panel discussion with “NBC Nightly News” Anchor Lester Holt hosted by the Aspen Security Forum. “Phase three means this is the first time this vaccine has been put into the general population into otherwise healthy individuals to see if the vaccine will protect them against natural infection.”
Ryan mentioned at least six potential Covid-19 vaccines in phase three human trials, such as those from drug companies Pfizer and Moderna. He added that there are over 150 under development across the world.
He said that to date, all the trials are focused on safety and generating an immune response in a small number of people. “They are sort of gates that the vaccine has to go through. This is not a gate. It is a race for the vaccine now to demonstrate that it can protect large numbers of people,” he said.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that scientists hope to find a safe and effective vaccine, but there is never a guarantee.
“We cannot say we have vaccines. We may or may not,” he said.
His statements come after President Donald Trump said the US may have a Covid-19 vaccine to prevent the disease “far in advance” of the end of the year.
Trump stressed the possibility that the US could deploy a safe and effective coronavirus vaccine for the Covid-19 before the upcoming US presidential election on November 3.
“Oh I think, I think in some cases, it’s possible before,” Trump told conservative TV personality Geraldo Rivera “But right around that time. We have great companies, great, these are the greatest companies in the world.”
Health experts have repeatedly announced that a Covid-19 vaccine could be deployed at the end of the year or early 2021, but there is no guarantee.
Scientists acknowledge the questions about how the human body responds once it has been infected with the coronavirus. They add that the answers may affect vaccine development, including how fast it can be distributed to the public.
Moreover, officials need to ensure that states have the vials, needles and syringes required to provide the vaccine, or they could risk having none of it.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, announced that a Covid-19 vaccine likely would not be “widely available” to the American public until “several months” into 2021.
Not a cure-all solution
Robert Lambkin-Williams, an independent virologist at Virology Consult Ltd, warned that a coronavirus vaccine cannot completely fight the pandemic and serve as the sole solution.
Speaking to CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe,” he said the use of antibodies in fighting off the virus and protecting them from being reinfected with Covid-19 has not been proven yet.
“That’s important because we don’t know if the vaccines that encourage those antibodies to be produced are going to work,” he said.
He added that scientists still hope that antibodies would stop the coronavirus from penetrating individuals more than once.
“The vaccine is not going to be a cure-all. We have not had a successful vaccine against this type of virus ever,” he said during an interview with CNBC. “We will get a vaccine of some description in the next couple of years, but it will not be perfect and it will need to be developed going forward.”
