Covid: ‘Life will be back to normal by next year’

london — If coronavirus vaccinations are rolled out widely, life could return to “normal” by next winter, one of the scientists behind the front-running coronavirus vaccine told British television on Sunday.

Ugur Sahin, the Turkish cofounder of German firm BioN, told the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show that “this winter will be hard” without any major impact from vaccinations.

Together with US giant Pfizer, BioN is developing the leading candidate in the worldwide chase for a vaccine,

“If all goes well, we will start to deliver the vaccine at the end of this year, or beginning of next year,” Sahin said.

“Our goal is to deliver more than 300 million doses by April next year, which could already have an impact,” he said.

The infection rate will then go down in summer, he predicted, adding that it is essential that there is a high takeup of the vaccination by autumn.

“I’m confident that this will happen, he said.

“What is absolutely essential is that we get a high vaccination rate before autumn/winter next year, so that means all the immunisation, vaccination approaches must be accomplished before next autumn,” Sahin said.

He said the “key side effects” seen so far were a mild to moderate pain in the injection site for a few days, while some of the participants had a mild to moderate fever for a similar period.

A number of vaccination companies are working to increase the supply, he said: “so we could have a normal winter next (year).”

Sahin and his wife Ozlem Tureci founded BioNTech in the western German city of Mainz in 2008. Having identified promising vaccine

blueprints, the company formed a partnership in March with American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. The announcement on Monday that their vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective in trials led news bulletins around the world and sent stock markets and hopes soaring.

BioNTech is now worth $25.8 billion (21.8 billion euros), more than Germany’s largest lender Deutsche Bank. The vaccine’s developers looked at 94 infections recorded so far in a study that has enrolled nearly 44,000 people in the US and five other countries.

More than 54.01 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 1,312,334 have died, according to a Reuters tally. —

I’m very confident that transmission between people will be reduced by such a highly effective vaccine — maybe not 90% but maybe 50% — but we should not forget that even that could result in a dramatic reduction of the pandemic spread.”

Prof Ugur Sahin, Co-founder of BioNTech