Medical pioneer: Don’t rush COVID-19 vaccine

In a White House news conference on Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told President Donald Trump a coronavirus vaccine would likely not be available within the next year or two. Trump responded: “I like the sound of a couple of months better.”

But a vaccine is not going to be available in the next couple of months, and according to Dr. Paul Offit, that’s appropriate. Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is the codeveloper of the rotavirus vaccine. It took roughly 26 years to perfect that protection against a disease that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was the leading cause for severe diarrhea in children prior to the vaccine’s introduction in 2006.

Offit talked about the process of vaccine development, the risks of rushing and the role of vaccination amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Q: Why is it unrealistic to expect a vaccine for coronavirus in a few months?

A: Nobody’s ever seen this virus before. Therefore, if you’re interested in making a vaccine, you first had access to that virus only a couple months ago. That’s not long.

(To make a vaccine) you first need to make a decision as to what approach you want to take. Then you have to do extensive animal model testing to make sure that the approach that you’ve taken is safe in animals, and that it induces an immune response which would likely be protective. Then you gradually do studies in people to make sure it’s safe, and then to make sure that it induces an immune response. That takes time, a lot of time, typically years.

Q: In 2018, after the World Health Organization declared an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was an experimental vaccine very quickly.

A: I think people got fooled by Ebola. When the outbreak occurred in West Africa and we had a vaccine pretty much that rolled off shelf within weeks, people thought, Ha! That’s easy.

But what they didn’t realize is people have been working on an Ebola vaccine for 20 years. They’ve done the animal model testing. They’ve done the testing to make sure that the vaccine was safe and was immunogenic.

But that’s not true here. This is a new virus. So we’re starting from scratch.

Q: What is it about this virus that makes people confident that a vaccine will be available?

A: I don’t know. You know, I’d say about 15 percent to 20 percent of the respiratory infections that we see in our hospital in the winter months are (types of ) coronavirus. This is a virus that has been around for 50 years.

But here are these three newer strains of coronavirus — MERS, SARS and now this COVID-19. The first two viruses, SARS and MERS, have come and gone.

I think this (COVID-19) virus likely will come back because it’s different. This virus is more like flu. It spreads in a similar manner to flu by respiratory droplet. It’s about as contagious as flu. It has the same set of symptoms as flu. And I think in the end, frankly, it’s going to have the same mortality rate as flu.

Q: Vaccine development is tightly regulated. How much that is about safety vs. red tape?

A: If you’re going to be testing this in otherwise healthy people who are very, very unlikely to die from this infection, you better make sure it’s safe. So you want those regulations in place.

Q: What do you think is behind the rush?

A: I think that because we falsely overrate, or incorrectly rate, what the mortality rate is, we’re willing to accept that things will be rushed through. In fact, coronavirus doesn’t have a high mortality rate.

There’s a virus that the CDC currently estimated has killed between 20,000 and 45,000 people in the United States — influenza. But only half the country gets that vaccine.

There’s only (19) deaths (in the U.S., as of Saturday) from COVID-19, but everybody would get a vaccine now.

The point being: We’re not very good at assessing risk.