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March 31, 2021 – Two-thirds of infectious disease specialists at leading academic institutions say the world will need new or modified COVID-19 vaccines within a year, new research shows.
In a survey of 77 epidemiologists from 28 countries by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, 66.2% predicted that the world has a year or less before the variants render current vaccines ineffective. The People’s Vaccine Alliance is a coalition of over 50 organizations, including the African Alliance, Oxfam, Public Citizen and UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV / AIDS.
Almost a third (32.5%) of those surveyed said ineffectiveness would occur in 9 months or less; 18.2% said 6 months or less.
Paul A. Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, told Medscape that while it’s difficult to say whether vaccines might become ineffective within that time frame, “it’s perfectly reasonable. to think that could happen. “
The good news, said Offit, who was not involved in the investigation, is that this coronavirus mutates slowly compared to other viruses such as the flu.
“To this day,” he said, “the mutations that have occurred are not far enough away from the immunity induced by your natural infection or immunization so that one is not protected at least. against serious and critical illness ”.
That is the purpose of vaccines, he said: “to prevent people from suffering a lot”.
A line can be crossed
“And so far this is happening, even with the variants,” Offit said. “That line has not been crossed. But I think we should assume it is possible.”
Offit said it would be essential to monitor anyone hospitalized who is known to have been previously infected or fully vaccinated. Then countries have to get really good at sequencing these viruses, he added.
The vast majority of respondents (88%) said that continued low vaccine coverage in many countries would make the emergence of vaccine-resistant mutations more likely.
The comparisons of coverage between countries are striking.
Many countries have not administered a single dose of vaccine
While rich countries administer COVID-19 vaccines at the rate of one person per second, many poorer countries have hardly administered vaccines, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance.
Additionally, according to researchers at Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Center, high- and upper-middle-income countries, which make up one-fifth of the world’s population, have purchased around 6 billion doses. But low- and lower-middle-income countries, which make up four-fifths of the population, bought only about 2.6 billion, an item of Nature reports.
“You are as strong as your weakest country,” Offit said. “If we haven’t learned that what is happening in other countries can (affect the world’s population), we don’t pay attention.”
Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the academic centers surveyed, did not specify a timeline for when vaccines would become ineffective, but said in a press release that the urgent need for widespread global immunization is real.
“Unless we vaccinate the world,” he said, “we are leaving the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could produce variants that could escape our current vaccines and require booster shots. to process them.
‘Say, but not surprising’
Panagis Galiatsatos, MD, a Johns Hopkins pulmonologist whose research focuses on health care disparities, said the survey results were “disastrous, but not surprising.”
The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland was another of the centers studied, but Galiatsatos was not personally involved in the investigation.
COVID-19, Galiatsatos points out, has revealed clear disparities, both in terms of who receives the vaccine and who is involved in trials to develop the vaccines.
“This is morally worrying and an ethical account,” he told Medscape.
The recognition of the band of destruction without borders that the virus is demanding is essential, he said.
The United States “must realize that this cannot be a US-centric issue,” he said. “We’ll go back to the beginning if we don’t make sure all countries are doing well. We haven’t seen that level of uniform approach.”
He noted that scientists have always known viruses mutate, but now the race is on to find the parts of the coronavirus that don’t mutate as much.
“I suspect we will probably need boosters instead of a whole other vaccine,” Galiatsatos said.
Among the strategies sought by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, all pharmaceutical companies working on COVID-19 vaccines openly share technology and intellectual property through the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 technology access pool, in order to accelerate the production and deployment of vaccines in all countries.
In the survey, 74% said open sharing of technology and intellectual property could boost global immunization coverage; 23% said maybe and 3% said it wouldn’t help.
The investigation was conducted between February 17 and March 25. Respondents include epidemiologists, virologists and infectious disease specialists from Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, France, Guatemala, India, Italy, Kenya, Lebanon, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Spain, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, United Kingdom, United States, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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