Vaccine plan for next pandemic
The emergence of a coronavirus combining the transmissibility of Covid-19 with the lethality of Sars or Mers would be ‘‘civilisationshattering’’. Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations
A vaccine to combat the next global pandemic would be created and approved in just 100 days under a new plan to avoid repeating the murky and chaotic early days of the coronavirus outbreak in China.
World leaders will debate the fast-tracked vaccine timeline during a session at the G7 summit in the seaside town of Carbis Bay this weekend.
The leaders are expected to ink the so-called Carbis Bay Declaration – a policy statement which seeks to prevent a future pandemic or minimise the impact of an outbreak during its crucial early stages.
The statement includes a goal of slashing the development and approval of new vaccines and therapeutics to under 100 days through greater scientific breakthroughs such as the mRNA technology behind jabs by Pfizer and Moderna.
‘‘In the last year the world has developed several effective coronavirus vaccines, licensed and manufactured them at pace and is now getting them into the arms of the people who need them,’’ said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. ‘‘But to truly defeat coronavirus and recover, we need to prevent a pandemic like this from ever happening again. That means learning lessons from the last 18 months and doing it differently next time around.’’
The 100-day goal has the support of pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer, Sanofi, Bayer, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca.
The health-focused G7
session, which Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison will attend as a guest today, will include an update on the coronavirus pandemic by World Health Organisation directorgeneral Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Billionaire American philanthropist Melinda French Gates and the United Kingdom’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance will talk about the 100-day vaccine mission.
Biden’s own science adviser, Eric Lander, said earlier this
month that a compressed window between vaccine creation and approval was increasingly realistic.
‘‘It was amazing at one level that we were able to produce highly effective vaccines in less than a year, but from another point of view you’d say, boy, a year’s a long time,’’ he said in an interview after being sworn in.
‘‘To really make a difference we want to get this done in 100 days. It makes you gulp for a second, but it’s totally feasible to do that.’’
It took scientists and regulators about 330 days to develop the Pfizer vaccine and release it for emergency use in the United Kingdom by early December.
Professor Sir Jeremy Farrer, the director of the London-based Wellcome Trust – one of the globe’s largest investors in medical science and research – suggested earlier this year that technological advances over the next three-to-five years could see vaccines developed within 100 days.
But he said scientists should aim to cut it to 30 days, noting a 100-day window applied at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year would have meant a vaccine was available in April 2020 – well after it had already spread around the globe.
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has won support from the UK government for its proposal for a library of prototype vaccines which could be quickly adjusted when a threat emerges.
The group said Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers) were of particular concern because their fatality rates are 10 to 35 per cent, making them between 5 and 16 times worse than Covid-19.
The coalition said the emergence of a coronavirus combining the transmissibility of Covid-19 with the lethality of Sars or Mers would be ‘‘civilisation-shattering’’.
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