A new Covid vaccine’s impact will work significantly over the summer and life should be back to normal by next winter only, said the co-developer of Pfizer, a US drug manufacture which is expected to launch the shot by this December-end.
“Normalcy from the Covid era can only be expected by next year’s winter as any vaccine will take to show its effect and will not immediately reduce number of infections,” said Prof Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech.
Prof Sahin’s vaccine candidate has proved to prevent over 90 per cent people from getting Covid-19, as per preliminary reports.
This winter would still be hard, he said in an interview to a news agency.
Last week, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech said their experimental vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 based on initial data from its Phase III trials. The encouraging results have prompted Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious-disease expert, to say that the country may begin offering the vaccine to priority groups at the end of December.
Sahin said he was confident the vaccine would reduce transmission between people as well as stop symptoms developing in someone who has had the vaccine, though not as high as the test results but still “maybe 50 per cent”.
He said as everything continued to go well, he said, the vaccine would begin to be delivered at the “end of this year, beginning of next year”. He, however made it clear that it was not yet known how long immunity would last after the vaccine’s second shot is administered.
The goal was to deliver more than 300 million doses worldwide by next April, he said on the BBC show, which “could allow us to only start to make an impact” and the bigger impact would happen later only.
“Summer will help us because the infection rate will go down in the summer and what is absolutely essential is that we get a high vaccination rate until or before autumn/winter next year,” he stressed.
Asked if the vaccine was as effective in older people as it is in younger people, he said he expected to have a better idea in the next three weeks.
Sahin also said the “key side effects” of the vaccine seen so far were a mild to moderate pain in the injection site for a few days, while some participants had a mild to moderate fever over a similar period.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 150 Covid-19 vaccines are presently in development, with around 44 candidates in clinical trials and 11 undergoing late-stage testing.