| |
Covid vaccine shots for the next several years
|
| |
| |
Published Tue, Feb 9 2021
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/09/covid-vaccine-jj-ceo-says-people-may-get-annual-shots-for-the-next-several-years.html
--------------------------------------------
Cold Reality Dawns: Covid-19 Is Likely Here to Stay
Vaccination drives hold out the promise of curbing Covid-19, but governments and businesses are increasingly accepting what epidemiologists have long warned: The pathogen will circulate for years, or even decades, leaving society to coexist with Covid-19 much as it does with other endemic diseases like flu, measles, and HIV.
Diseases are considered endemic when they remain persistently present but manageable, like flu. The extent of the spread varies by disease and location, epidemiologists say. Rabies, malaria, HIV and Zika all are endemic infectious diseases, but their prevalence and human toll vary globally.
Endemic Covid-19 doesn't necessarily mean continuing coronavirus restrictions, infectious-disease experts said, largely because vaccines are so effective at preventing severe disease and slashing hospitalizations and deaths. Hospitalizations have already fallen 30% in Israel after it vaccinated a third of its population. Deaths there are expected to plummet in weeks ahead.
But some organizations are planning for a long-term future in which prevention methods such as masking, good ventilation and testing continue in some form. Meanwhile, a new and potentially lucrative Covid-19 industry is emerging quickly, as businesses invest in goods and services such as air-quality monitoring, filters, diagnostic kits and new treatments.
Very early on, after countries failed to contain the coronavirus and transmission raged globally, "it was evident to most virologists that the virus would become endemic," said John Mascola, director of the National Institutes of Health's Vaccine Research Center. "When a virus is so easily transmitted among humans, and the population [lacks immunity], it will spread any place it has the opportunity to spread. It's like a leak in a dam."
As scientists develop new treatments, Covid-19 will further "become an infection that we can live with," said Rachel Bender Ignacio, an infectious-disease expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. As such, she said, it will be important to develop therapies for the persistent debilitating symptoms that many patients struggle with months after getting sick, like memory fog, loss of smell and digestive and heart problems.
Diseases that spread from people who don't show symptoms-often the case with the coronavirus-are particularly hard to eradicate. Decades of multibillion-dollar global efforts haven't eradicated another such disease, polio, which, while eliminated from the U.S. in the 1970s, was cleared from Europe only in 2002 and still exists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Respiratory viruses like the novel coronavirus are prone to becoming endemic because they can transmit through usually benign acts, like breathing and talking, and can be particularly good at infecting cells. They include OC43, a coronavirus that researchers now think caused the Russian Flu of the 1890s, a pandemic that killed one million. That virus-still present in the population-is responsible for many common colds, though it has become less virulent likely because people developed immunity.
------------------------------------
Key Points
• People may need to get vaccinated against Covid-19 annually, just like seasonal flu shots, over the next several years, Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky told CNBC on Tuesday.
• "Unfortunately, as [the virus] spreads it can also mutate," he told CNBC's Meg Tirrell during a Healthy Returns Spotlight event.
People may need to get vaccinated against Covid-19 annually, just like seasonal flu shots, over the next several years, Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky told CNBC on Tuesday.
"Unfortunately, as [the virus] spreads it can also mutate," he told CNBC's Meg Tirrell during a Healthy Returns Spotlight event. "Every time it mutates, it's almost like another click of the dial so to speak where we can see another variant, another mutation that can have an impact on its ability to fend off antibodies or to have a different kind of response not only to a therapeutic but also to a vaccine."
Public health officials and infectious disease experts have said there is a high likelihood that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, meaning it will become present in communities at all times, though likely at lower levels than it is now. Health officials will have to continuously watch for new variants of the virus, so scientists can produce vaccines to fight them, medical experts say.
Gorsky's comment came after J&J said it applied for an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its coronavirus vaccine. Unlike Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccines, which require two doses given about three to four weeks apart, J&J's only requires one dose, easing logistics for health-care providers.
U.S. officials and Wall Street analysts are eagerly anticipating the authorization of J&J's vaccine, which could happen as early as this month. President Joe Biden is trying to pick up the pace of vaccinations in the U.S. and experts say his administration will need an array of drugs and vaccines to defeat the virus, which has killed more than 450,000 Americans over the last year, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced in August that it reached a deal with Janssen, J&J's pharmaceutical subsidiary, worth approximately $1 billion for 100 million doses of its vaccine. The deal gives the federal government the option to order an additional 200 million doses, according to the announcement.
Gorsky told CNBC that the company's first priority is to work with the FDA toward U.S. authorization. He said J&J is working "full speed" on vaccine manufacturing, adding the company is "extremely confident" it will meet its target to deliver 100 million doses of its Covid vaccine to the U.S. by the end of June.
"We will meet our commitments and at the same time we're doing everything we possibly can to safely and effectively accelerate" production, he said, adding people are "highly anticipating" being able to get a single shot against the virus.
J&J is also continuing work on a two-dose coronavirus vaccine, Gorsky said. The company expects two-shot vaccine data from clinical trials in the second half of 2021, he said.
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
