Speed of vaccine race raises fears
BRUSSELS/ LONDON • The frenetic race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine has intensified safety concerns about an inoculation, prompting governments and drugmakers to raise awareness to ensure their efforts to beat the coronavirus aren’t derailed by public distrust.
There are more than 200 COVID- 19 vaccine candidates in development globally, including more than 20 in human clinical trials. U. S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday it was possible the United States would have a coronavirus vaccine before the Nov. 3 election.
They typically take 10 years or longer to develop and test for safety and effectiveness.
Trump, who is seeking re- election to a second term amid a U. S. economy crippled by coronavirus shutdowns, has pushed for things to get “back to normal” as coronavirus deaths in the country average more than 1,000 per day.
In the drive to find a potential COVID- 19 vaccine “fast is good for politicians,” said Heidi Larson, who leads the Vaccine Confidence Project ( VCP), a global surveillance program on vaccine trust. “But from the public perspective, the general sentiment is: ‘ too fast can’t be safe,’ ” she told Reuters.
Regulators around the world have repeatedly said speed will not compromise safety, as quicker results would stem from conducting in parallel trials that are usually done in sequence.
However, these reassurances have failed to convince many, including in Western countries where skepticism about vaccinations was already growing before the pandemic.
Preliminary results of a survey conducted over the last three months in 19 countries showed that only about 70 per cent of respondents in the United Kingdom and the U. S. would take a COVID-19 vaccine if available, Scott Ratzan, co- leader of Business Partners to CONVINCE, told Reuters.
Business Partners to CONVINCE, a U. K./ U. S. initiative that is partly government funded, conducted the survey jointly with VCP and the results were broadly in line with a Reuters/ Ipsos poll of the U. S. public in May.
“We just see this distrust growing against science and government,” said Ratzan.
“We need to address legitimate concerns about the rapid pace of development, political over- promises and the risks of vaccination.”
The VCP/ Business Partners’ survey, expected to be published in a few weeks, will also show that Chinese participants were the most trusting of vaccines, while Russians were the least so, Ratzan said.
Drugmakers and governments had hoped the scale of the COVID-19 crisis would allay concerns about vaccines, which they see as crucial to defeating the pandemic and enabling economies to fully recover from its impact.