Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna
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The CEO of Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer Moderna warned on Wednesday that the coronavirus that has brought the world economies to a standstill and hospitals that have been overwhelmed will be ‘forever’.
Public health officials and infectious disease experts said there was a high probability that Covid-19 would become an endemic disease, meaning it would be present in communities at all times, although it is likely to be at lower levels than now.
Stephane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, appeared on Wednesday to agree that Covid-19 would become endemic, saying, “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away.”
“We are going to live with this virus forever,” he said during a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare conference.
Health officials will have to constantly look at new variants of the virus so that scientists can manufacture vaccines to combat them, he said. Researchers in Ohio said Wednesday they have discovered two new varieties that are likely to originate in the U.S. and that one of them quickly became the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-week period in late December and early January. has.
According to Pfizer researchers, the vaccine developed with BioNTech appears to be effective against a major mutation in the British tribe, as well as a variant found in South Africa.
Moderna’s vaccine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in Americans 18 years and older. Additional studies have yet to be completed in children, whose immune systems may respond differently to vaccinations than those of adults.
U.S. officials are rushing to distribute doses of both vaccines, but it will likely take months before the U.S. can vaccinate enough people to trigger herd immunity, meaning the virus does not have enough new hosts to disperse. Still, Bancel said Wednesday he expects the U.S. to be one of the first major countries to achieve “adequate protection” against the virus.
There are already four coronaviruses that are endemic around the world, but according to the World Health Organization, they are not as contagious or deadly as Covid-19.