Thanks Gerry, some common sense there.
" There’s a virus that the CDC currently estimated has killed between
20,000 and 45,000 people in the United States -- influenza. But only half
the country gets that vaccine.
There’s only 14 deaths [in the U.S., as of Friday afternoon] from COVID-19,
but everybody would get a vaccine now.
The point being: We’re not very good at assessing risk."
I think we are up to 40 dead now from this Wuhan flu.
-------------
Max
Charleston SC
On Fri, Mar 13, 2020 at 12:24 PM archer75--- via Mercedes <
mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote:
Philly vaccine pioneer: We can’t rush a coronavirus vaccine | Q&A
At a White House news conference Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, the head of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, told President
Donald
Trump a coronavirus vaccine would likely not be available within the next
year or two. Trump responded: “I like the sound of a couple of months
better.”
But a vaccine is not going to be available in the next couple of months,
and according to Dr. Paul Offit, that’s appropriate. Offit, director of
the
Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, is the
co-developer of the rotavirus vaccine. It took roughly 26 years to
perfect
that protection against a disease that, according to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention, was the leading cause for severe diarrhea
in children before the vaccine’s introduction in 2006.
Why is it unrealistic to expect a vaccine for coronavirus in a few
months?
Nobody’s ever seen this virus before. Therefore, if you’re interested in
making a vaccine, you first had access to that virus only a couple months
ago. That’s not long.
[To make a vaccine] you first need to make a decision as to what approach
you want to take. Then you have to do extensive animal model testing to
make sure that the approach that you’ve taken is safe in animals, and
that
it induces an immune response which would likely be protective. Then you
gradually do studies in people to make sure it’s safe, and then to make
sure that it induces an immune response. That takes time, a lot of time,
typically years. Then and only then, are you ready to put it into people
to
see whether or not it works in an outbreak situation.
In 2018, after the World Health Organization declared an Ebola outbreak
in
the Democratic Republic of Congo, there was an experimental vaccine very
quickly.
I think people got fooled by Ebola. When the outbreak occurred in West
Africa and we had a vaccine pretty much that rolled off shelf within
weeks,
people thought, Ha! That’s easy.
But what they didn’t realize is people have been working on an Ebola
vaccine for 20 years. They’ve done the animal model testing. They’ve done
the testing to make sure that the vaccine was safe and was immunogenic.
But that’s not true here. This is a new virus. So we’re starting from
scratch.
What is it about this virus that makes people confident that a vaccine
will be available?
I don’t know. You know, I’d say about 15% to 20% of the respiratory
infections that we see in our hospital in the winter months are [types
of]
coronavirus. This is a virus that has been around for 50 years.
But here are these three newer strains of coronavirus — MERS, SARS, and
now this COVID-19. The first two viruses, SARS and MERS, have come and
gone.
I think this [COVID-19] virus likely will come back because it’s
different. If you were infected with SARS or MERS viruses, you were sick.
And it’s very easy to tell who was sick and who wasn’t. You could then
quarantine those people — put a moat around them, if you will — so that
they wouldn’t infect others. So those infections quickly died out. This
virus is more like flu. It spreads in a similar manner to flu by
respiratory droplet. It’s about as contagious as flu. It has the same set
of symptoms as flu. And I think in the end, frankly, it’s going to have
the
same mortality rate as flu.
There are certainly human studies showing that if you’re infected with a
coronavirus — meaning one of the typical coronaviruses — you can have
immunity to that strain for at least a year and probably longer. That’s
encouraging. If natural infection can protect you, then it’s encouraging
that it can produce an immune response which is protective and which you
should be able to mimic with vaccination.
Vaccine development is tightly regulated. How much of that is about
safety
vs. red tape?
If you’re going to be testing this in otherwise healthy people who are
very, very unlikely to die from this infection, you better make sure it’s
safe. So you want those regulations in place.
An example is the dengue vaccine. When it was tested in Latin America and
Philippines, it was found to actually increase your risk of dengue shock
syndrome. Children who were less than 9 years of age, who had never been
exposed to the virus before, were actually more likely to be hurt by the
vaccine than helped by it. Now, you only knew that from doing large
clinical trials with tens of thousands of people.
The history of medical breakthroughs is littered with tragedy. You want
to
make sure that things are safe.
What do you think is behind the apparent willingness to skirt the rules
to
rush a vaccine?
I think that because we falsely overrate, or incorrectly rate, what the
mortality rate is, we’re willing to accept that things will be rushed
through. In fact, coronavirus doesn’t have a high mortality rate.
There’s a virus that the CDC currently estimated has killed between
20,000
and 45,000 people in the United States -- influenza. But only half the
country gets that vaccine.
There’s only 14 deaths [in the U.S., as of Friday afternoon] from
COVID-19, but everybody would get a vaccine now.
The point being: We’re not very good at assessing risk.
https://www.inquirer.com/health/coronavirus/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-trump-paul-offit-20200306.html
Gerry
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