Young and healthy? Prepare to wait longer for vaccine jab

YOUNG and healthy people should be prepared to wait their turn for immunisation, experts warned this week.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) chief scientist suggested the delay could last over a year for some among the young and healthy.

“People tend to think, ‘ah, on the first of January or the first of April, I’m going to get a vaccine and then things will be back to normal’,”

Soumya Swaminathan said in an online WHO question-and-answer session on Wednesday. “It’s not going to work like that.”

“There will be a lot of guidance coming out, but I think an average person, a healthy, young person, might have to wait until 2022 to get a vaccine,” she said.

Young people can get sick and die of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and can spread it. But evidence suggests they are less likely to suffer serious complications than older people or those with health problems.

With an unprecedented global demand for a vaccine, governments and international organisations such as the WHO will have to work to ensure that people most at risk get priority. Health-care workers and others on the front lines may go first, followed by the elderly or sick.

The remaining healthy, young people waiting for a return to normal life may end up at the back of the line.

“Vaccines are going to be available in the initial years in too small quantities to vaccinate the 7 billion people we have across the globe today,” Robin Nandy, the chief of immunisation at Unicef, said in an interview. “Vaccines will arrive in dribs and drabs.”

Those providing essential services including health care and education should be among the first vaccinated, he said. “We have to live with the pandemic for a while, so we need these systems to continue.”

Children, often the target of mass immunisation programmes, may have to sit out the initial rounds of vaccines, in part because few vaccine candidates have been fully tested on people under 18. Confusing matters further, some scientists have warned that early vaccines may be effective only half the time, which would mean that more doses are needed. The US Food and Drug Administration has said a vaccine must be at least 50% effective to win approval in the US, though it hopes for a higher efficiency.

Countries that are pursuing their own vaccines will also have to prioritize. In China, early doses of one vaccine have gone to soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army.

Russia, which this week approved a second vaccine, has said doctors and teachers may be the first to get vaccinated; President Vladimir Putin said one of his adult daughters had participated in a preliminary trial.

The US, which has not joined the Covax initiative, has instead pumped billions of dollars into its vaccine development programme dubbed Operation Warp Speed. In a framework released this month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (Nasem) said 10 million to 15 million doses of a vaccine may be available initially, which may cover only 3% to 5% of the US population.

The Nasem guidance also offered a tiered approach for how a vaccine should be distributed, with health-care workers and first responders in first place and the elderly or vulnerable in second.

Essential workers, including teachers and school staffers, would be next, alongside people in homeless shelters and prisons.

Under the guidance, children and young adults would receive the vaccine in a fourth tier of immunisations, before it is passed on to the remaining population.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said a Covid-19 vaccine may not be recommended for children when it first becomes available in the US, because the vaccine has not been tested on them.

Although the time scale for widespread vaccine use may be longer than many expect, other therapeutic drugs are likely to have helped lower the mortality rate, and improved physical distancing practices can prevent infection. |