- At a virtual Davos economic forum, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said there was a high probability that COVID-19 vaccines would be ineffective in the future.
- Bourla said the company is working to ensure that it can deliver a high-efficiency vaccine within 100 days or less, which is a radical acceleration of the development timeline.
- Former BARDA director Richard Hatchett also stressed that governments should view infectious diseases as an ‘existential threat to our society’.
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Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said during the virtual Davos World Economic Forum in 2021 that he believes the “great possibility” exists that vaccines will not be effective in the future, although this has not yet happened.
“It is very likely that this will happen one day,” Bourla said.
Bourla said Pfizer is working to speed up vaccine research and development if that happens. Bourla wants to reduce the time to recognize a threat of infectious disease on a pandemic scale, to authorize a vaccine to 100 days or less – a timeline that is even shorter than the 300-day target set by Trump last year Government’s Operation Warp Speed has been set. The company intends to maintain the efficacy of its vaccine candidate by 95%, despite the changing variants.
We are beginning to understand how variants can affect the vaccines
Over the past 24 hours, Johnson & Johnson and Novavax have both announced the efficacy results of their COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
Although the initial outlook for Johnson & Johnson’s single dose looked promising, its overall efficacy depends on only 66%, with even less efficacy compared to the B.1.351 variant from South Africa. The US-based Novavax vaccine has shown 89% efficacy in trials in the UK, where another more contagious variant has developed but dropped to below 50% in the small South African trial.
For comparison, Pfizer’s vaccine, made with BioNTech, has not been tested on the actual COVID-19 variant. However, the company on Wednesday released results showing that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine worked against laboratory-made “pseudoviruses” designed to have the same mutations as the British and South African variants.
Read more: Pfizer says its vaccine works against important coronavirus mutations that occur in the South African and British variants
Bourla was one of four speakers in a panel discussing the need for cooperation between business and government to present a global pandemic and combat future threats to human health.
Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation, who also spoke in the panel, stressed the need to be prepared for future iterations.
Referring to the effectiveness of less than 60% of both the Johnson & Johnson and Novavax against the new South African coronavirus variant, Hatchett said that the world’s only hope to get the virus ahead is to reduce its worldwide circulation to control.
“Governments must recognize that emerging infectious diseases and pandemic wires are an existential threat to our society,” said Hatchett, a former BARDA director. “It’s an important feature of the way we live.”
If we want society to continue as it did before COVID-19, Hatchett said governments need to make long-term, sustained investments to prepare for future pandemics.
Concluding the remark, he said that the world should focus its attention on other coronaviruses and other viral families that could develop into higher mortality rates than SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.