GET USED TO COVID-19, SAYS VACCINE EXPERT,
Work progressing on global vaccine, but distribution unlikely this year
COVID-19 could become a virus that shows up each year with other coronaviruses, according to a B.C. vaccine expert.
Dr. Manish Sadarangani, director of the Vaccine Evaluation Centre at B.C. Children’s Hospital, said there were four coronaviruses that usually circulate each year in B.C. that all lead to mild colds.
Because symptoms are mild, no one had tried to create a vaccine for them, Sadarangani said. The two severe forms of coronavirus that existed before COVID-19 — SARS and MERS — weren’t widely spread and so no mass vaccine was created.
“While people have been working on the MERS and SARS coronaviruses, none of them (vaccine research) have ended up in widespread use,” he said. “We are really starting a little bit from the beginning.”
Sadarangani, who is part of a University of B.C. team that is hoping to begin testing an oral coronavirus vaccine later this year, said there were 13 human trials of vaccines underway around the world, and 128 in preclinical evaluations.
Promising candidates include shots being developed by biotechnology company Moderna Inc., several Chinese programs and a partnership of the University of Oxford in England and AstraZeneca PLC.
Sadarangani, who studied medicine at Cambridge and Oxford universities before moving into pediatrics, infection control and then vaccines, said the earliest a global vaccine would be available is the end of the year, but much more likely in 2021 or beyond.
“We will need billions of doses of vaccine that is extremely unlikely to be produced by just one company,” he said. “The hope is there will be multiple vaccines that are successful, and then it has to be figured out in terms of implementation among various populations.”
The WHO hopes to have two billion doses of a handful of effective vaccines available by the end of next year.
But that’s enough for less than one-third of the world’s population.
Sadarangani said COVID-19 could reappear each year, or it could disappear, or it could return but with less severe symptoms. The virus changes all the time, to the point where epidemiologists are able to determine what part of the world a particular strain has come from.
“It could become established and be like the other viruses that circulate each year, it could be that once the pandemic is over we don’t see it again, or if it does become established we don’t know if it will cause this severe disease every year. There are lots of things we still have to learn about the virus.”
Future vaccines that do arrive on the scene may not provide longterm immunity. If COVID-19 is like other coronaviruses, including some that cause the common cold, individuals may need annual booster shots to ward off subtle changes.
On the treatment side, last week University of Oxford researchers reported that a widely used anti-inflammatory drug called dexamethasone improved survival in COVID -19 patients, the first treatment to show life-saving promise months into the pandemic.
While the virus ebbs and flows regionally, it’s on the march at the global level, where there are 8.5 million confirmed cases and the pace is accelerating.
At the start of May, the daily tally of new confirmed cases was running at about 88,000; now it’s 176,000, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Some experts say the global death toll will top one million.
In B.C., 168 people have died.