The current vaccines may not be enough to bring about the end of COVID-19. In fact, the virus may be with us for years to come.
Increasingly, public health and medicine authorities are pointing out that mutating strains and blurring the vaccine’s effectiveness could mean permanent campaigns to keep the population immune, including the need to organize regular shots.
The virus can turn into an acute, though prolonged crisis into a fact.
This does not mean that we have to live with the periodic barriers or social measures on the national scale that we have seen. But that means a constant effort to confront COVID-19. Governments will be looking to build up long-term vaccine and PBT manufacturing capacity and to organize regular vaccinations that can make the annual flu season look comparable.
That fear is exacerbated by new strains of the virus popping up around the world. Some of the vaccines currently in mass production have been shown to be less effective against the South African variant, while another mutation of the deadly virus appears to directly affect the ability of vaccines and reactions.
Pfizer announced on Tuesday that it was preparing for a ‘potentially durable, long-lasting need for COVID-19 vaccines’, and investors said there was likely to be a “need to boost regularly” to boost the immune response of its mRNA vaccine to maintain.
And Moderna CEO, the other COVID-19 mRNA vaccine manufacturer, said last month that the world will have to live with COVID-19 ‘forever’. Of course, both companies can reap financial rewards from the perpetual demand for COVID-19 vaccines.
The Biden government, meanwhile, has suggested that part of its effort to build a deeper public health infrastructure will focus on the prospect of viral mutations that will turn COVID-19 into a much longer-lasting crisis.
Four to five years?
President Biden’s U.S. rescue plan contains two provisions specifically aimed at the potential for new variants that could erase or reduce the effectiveness of the shots currently in production.
One proposal would send $ 30 billion to supplement the disaster relief fund, a FEMA program to compensate state governments for their COVID-19 response and for the purchase of supplies such as PPE.
The Biden plan also provides $ 10 billion for the Title III provision of the Defense Production Act to ‘expand domestic production for pandemic supplies’.
The law allows the government to pump money in the form of loans in strategic industries “to expand domestic production capacity for critical commodities,” said Dave Kaufman, a former FEMA official who worked on DPA issues and is now at the CNAS brainstorm, TPM said last week.
The policy reflects a growing fear that the COVID-19 crisis will not be an acute emergency washed away by one massive wave of vaccinations, but rather a long-term threat.
“A lot of people, myself included, thought last year that if we got an effective vaccine, it would take six months and we would be over it,” said Craig Fugate, a former FEMA administrator under President Obama, who on a Bid transition served. review team, told TPM. “I think more and more, it can take four to five years to get it under control, new outbreaks, new variations and getting people vaccinated.”
One possible scenario is that mass vaccinations will bring the current phase of the pandemic under control before mutations in the virus can cause it to spread, despite the immunity that the current lap round creates. Another possibility is that the immunity that the vaccines confer in production erodes over time enough that the virus can continue to spread.
One possibility or another would require large investments in the manufacture of vaccines, which are hampered in part by the fine-tuning of the production process. The DPA may be helpful in meeting the requirement.
The prospect of vaccines being required over an ultra-long-term period raises separate questions regarding costs; the government is currently purchasing COVID-19 vaccines directly. But for many, the flu vaccine only became free of charge after the Affordable Care Act ordered insurers to cover the shot.
Go viral
All this does not mean that the virus will be a deadly threat forever. One study found that it can turn into a disease with the severity of colds, while still spreading in the human population.
Paul Offit, a vaccine developer and professor at Philadelphia Children’s Hospital who serves on an FDA advisory committee, told TPM that perpetual vaccinations would be necessary in two cases: one where the virus spreads so much from one year to the next. mutate that the vaccine does not protect you. ”
Offit noted that this is a separate case from the one raised by Pfizer, whether the two initial shots are enough to maintain immunity over a longer period of time.
“This is where you have faded immunity,” he said.
In either case, it would mean that the COVID-19 problem could have no definitive end.
“In most pandemics, there’s no clear line you cross, and it’s over,” Fugate said.
Offit said the coronavirus is relatively young in terms of its existence in the human population. It spread all over the world after he left Wuhan, in the form of a new variant.
“You should start to worry when you see people who are fully vaccinated with the mRNA units that, despite that, are still being hospitalized with the strain strain,” Offit said. “This is when you know your vaccine has failed.”