Leaders weigh risks of reopening without a vaccine

On a weekend when many pandemic-weary people emerged from weeks of lockdown, leaders in the U.S. and Europe weighed the risks and rewards of lifting COVID-19 restrictions, knowing that a vaccine could take years to develop.

In separate stark warnings, two major European leaders bluntly told their citizens the world needs to adapt to living with the coronavirus and cannot wait to be saved by a vaccine. “We are confronting this risk, and we need to accept it, otherwise we would never be able to relaunch,” Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said, heeding a push by regional leaders to allow restaurants, bars and beach facilities to open today, weeks ahead of a previous timetable.

Warnings by Italy’s Conte and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came as governments worldwide and many U.S. states struggled with restarting economies blind- sided by the pandemic. “We are facing a calculated risk, in the awareness ... that the epidemiological curve could go back up,” Conte said, adding that Italy could “not afford” to wait until a vaccine was developed. Health experts say the world could be months if not years away from having a vaccine available to everyone.

Britain’s Johnson, who was hospital- ized last month with COVID-19, speculated that a vaccine may not be developed at all, despite the huge global effort to produce one. “There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition,” he wrote in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.