Experts: Vaccine won’t bring back normal life
Virus will return each year, doctors say
Once we have a vaccine for the novel coronavirus devastating our world, life will get back to normal, right?
Dream on.
There are many hurdles to leap before a vaccine arrives, with estimates that it won’t happen until this winter at the earliest. Even that would be a far faster development time than it takes for most vaccines, experts in the field say.
And getting the majority of the population to get their immunization isn’t as easy as it might seem.
Dean Sten Vermund, of the Yale School of Public Health, said COVID- 19 will not be like the flu, even after a vaccine is developed. Because many people don’t get flu shots, thousands die of it every year. COVID is worse.
“Coronavirus seems to be a bit more infectious than the flu and it seems to be more lethal than the flu,” Vermund said. “And so if it’s more infectious, we need a higher proportion of the population to get the vaccine to achieve what we call herd immunity. And we are in the middle of a major anti- vax movement.”
People like Jenny McCarthy and Robert Kennedy Jr. “are shameless when it comes to misrepresenting data on vaccine safety and on vaccine efficacy,” Vermund said. “So if this continues, then we’re going to have the same problem we have with the flu vaccine, where only a fraction of the people who need it actually get it every year.”
Vermund said achieving herd immunity requires at least 70 percent of the population to have developed antibodies, either through having had COVID- 19 or by immunization.
Suzanne Rose, director of research at Stamford Hospital, said she is “very confident” that “multiple” vaccines will be developed, and she’s optimistic they will be effective.
“I’m definitely hopeful about a vaccine,” she said. “It’s a very stable virus, which means it doesn’t show a potential to mutate.” But while it’s possible there will be “a blockbuster treatment,” she said, “I have less hope that there will be one treatment that’s effective for this virus.”
Rose, whose research department is conducting a clinical trial using plasma from patients who have recovered from COVID- 19, said, “from a scientific perspective and seeing that some of the drugs we tried have not worked, we need to get to a vaccine as soon as possible.”
She believes people will feel more at ease once there are adequate treatments and a vaccine. “People are dying to forget that this ever happened. We don’t want to keep thinking about COVID- 19,” she said. “We have this trauma and sense of doom every day.”
The danger of the coronavirus may be lessened at some point. “We eradicated smallpox and other diseases that are catastrophic,” Rose said. But for the dark mood to lift it will require “knowing you had it, having a vaccine and getting antibody testing.”
“We need to know if people are exposed [ or immunized] and that makes people feel better,” she said.
Dr. Michael Parry, director of infectious disease and microbiology at Stamford Hospital, said we can expect to wear masks and social distance “for the next year.”
“If we get a vaccine, then we can relax and do less of this, but if we want to stay healthy, we have to protect ourselves,” he said.
Giving plasma containing coronavirus antibodies to patients is providing passive immunity, Parry said. That is done for people who may have contracted rabies. Avaccine that stimulates the immune system to produce antibodies, on the other hand, grants active immunity. But there are a number of challenges.
According to Vermund, “there are almost 90 vaccines that we’re aware of that are in development. There are clinical trials being mounted now for some of the candidates that are most advanced. … Some of these products are different types of vaccines that have never been developed into a commercial vaccine. So are these novel strategies a grand slam home run in waiting or are they simply not going to see the light of day?”
Other candidates use “more conventional approaches where at least they’ve worked in other viral diseases,” he said. While 90 percent of vaccines produce antibodies that protect the patient, not all do. “That’s not true for HIV, it’s not true for hepatitis C. There are plenty of examples where having antibodies does not actually correlate with protection,” Vermund said.
Before large clinical trials are even started, the vaccine must be tested for safety, and it must be a drug that can be produced in high quantities. “There’s no way of short- cutting safety studies,” he said.
“But there is a massive global effort and there’s a lot of money to be made from the first COVID vaccine, so there are a lot of major companies, startup companies, academic entities that are working on this issue. So this may be one of the fastest vaccines ever developed because of the global effort,” he said.
Until there is a vaccine, and one that most people will get, the risk of contracting COVID- 19 is still high, Vermund said. “Not even in New York City, where the virus was pretty much unimpeded for weeks, are they anywhere near herd immunity,” he said. And despite the social distancing and mask wearing, it’s still too easy to spread the virus.
“Coronavirus seems to be a bit more infectious than the flu and it seems to be more lethal than the flu. ... And so if it’s more infectious, we need a higher proportion of the population to get the vaccine to achieve what we call herd immunity. And we are in the middle of a major anti- vax movement.”
Dean Sten Vermund, Yale School of Public Health