(Newswire.net— October 4, 2020) — A group of leading scientists warned that even an effective vaccine will not be able to return life to normal by the following spring in 2021.
The vaccine is often seen as the Holy Grail that will end the pandemic. However, a report by researchers gathered by the Royal Society states that we must be “realistic” about what and when the vaccine will be able to achieve, writes the BBC.
Scientists around the world are developing more than 200 vaccines to protect against the virus.
“A vaccine offers great hope for potentially ending the pandemic, but we do know that the history of vaccine development is littered with lots of failures,” said Dr. Fiona Culley, from the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.
There is optimism that some people may receive a vaccine this year, and mass vaccination will begin early next year. However, the report of the Royal Society warns that arriving at a state of global availability will be a long process.
“Even when the vaccine is available it doesn’t mean within a month everybody is going to be vaccinated, we’re talking about six months, nine months… a year,” said Prof Nilay Shah, head of chemical engineering at Imperial College London.
“There’s not a question of life suddenly returning to normal in March,” Shah added.
The report says we face “huge” challenges. Some of the experimental approaches being taken, such as RNA vaccines, have never been mass-produced before.
There are issues related to raw materials, both for the vaccine and for the glass bottles and the capacity of the refrigerators used to store them, with the prediction that some vaccines require storage at minus 80 degrees Celsius.
Professor Shah estimates that vaccination would have to take place at such a speed that about 30,000 trained staff would have to work full time to achieve this.
Data from early studies show that vaccines elicit an immune response, but studies have not yet shown whether this is enough to provide complete protection or merely reduce the symptoms of COVID-19.
Coronavirus infection has been confirmed in the United States in more than 7.5 million people, of whom more than 213,000 have died.