With international news reports detailing promising COVID-19 vaccine candidates moving into advanced human trials, along with renewed claims that a game-changing drug could be ready by the year’s end, Niagara’s acting medical officer of health says it may be helpful to tamp down expectations.
Dr. Mustafa Hirji isn’t talking about how effective a vaccine may be, but how long it will take before anyone in Niagara gets an immunizing shot even after a vaccine is approved for use.
The process, he said, won’t be quick.
“We are preparing an 11- to 12-week blitz,” Hirji said. “That will be to get the early adopters and then we have to continue to get everyone else. But that is after a vaccine is approved, manufactured and distributed.”
And those last three hurdles could slow down the time frame from successful vaccine approval to public distribution by several months.
“This could be particularly true if the vaccine is made in the United States,” said Hirji. “They might actual hog the vaccine for a time. There could be a lot of tricky politics involved.”
This week, international headlines pointed to two vaccine trials — one by Moderna Inc in the United States in conjunction with Cambridge University and one in the United Kingdom at Oxford — that have passed through the first round of human testing with promising results.
There is still some distance in travel before final approval for either drug. Large scale human tests are needed to determine efficacy and safety.
Hirji said if either, or both, prove successful, economics and politics will be the next challenging hurdle.
The home nation of the successful developer will likely want to use the vaccine on their own populations first. Hirji expects this will be particularly true if an American drug is greenlit first, requiring other governments, including Ottawa, to negotiate with Washington.
Manufacturing billions of doses to launch a global immunization program is also going take time. Some of those arrangements are already in place, but it will take months to produce and distribute around the world.
Even after the vaccine arrives, it will take months to immunize the community to a sufficient level to significantly tamp down the threat of the novel coronavirus. Emergency services, health care workers and those most vulnerable to the virus may be prioritized to get the vaccine first. That time frame could be extended if more than one injection is required. The Moderna vaccine, for instance, would require two shots a month apart.
Hirji says this all means that the current infection control measures — physical distancing, masks and hand hygiene — will be necessary to prevent the spread of the virus even after a vaccine is approved.
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Just how much a COVID-19 vaccine will allow those measures to be put aside remains an open question. Hirji has said the most successful vaccine ever developed, the vaccine for measles, is around 98 per cent effective in preventing disease. Other vaccines, like the annual flu shot, have a significant impact on disease spread but is not nearly as effective as the measles shot.
Hirji said public acceptance of a vaccine will also impact how much it curtails the spread of the disease. He said influenza remains a serious public health threat, in part, because not enough people get the flu vaccine every year. The greater the number of people immunized, the more effective a vaccine program will be.
