At a faster pace, vaccines are here, and more is on the way. Less than a year after the coronavirus began raiding the world, the first images raise hopes of eradicating the COVID-19 pandemic from the face of the earth.
Today’s programs in the US and UK are the precursors to vaccination campaigns that aim to reach the entire population of the planet – the 8 billion people in every part of the world.
There is reason for hope. Vaccinations are the best, and perhaps only, way to eradicate an infectious disease: Smallpox has been eradicated and polio is on the verge of extinction, with only two countries where transmission continues . But global vaccination campaigns will take time – usually decades – suggesting that, even with the latest technologies, money and the potential behind an unprecedented global campaign to eradicate COVID-19 is not. the disease is likely to be eradicated at any time soon.
“It would surprise me to eradicate this virus now that it is worldwide,” said Walter Orenstein, associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center in Atlanta and former head of the U.S. Centers vaccination program. for Disease Control and Prevention. “It surprised me, given how contagious it is.”
Bags in supply and distribution have already risen in the opening days of the US campaign, and the UK, the first Western country to start vaccination, received just 138,000 people in its first week. At the same time, Europe has not started inoculations, and may not do so until after Christmas.
Concerns are growing about the time it will take to vaccinate the world’s major vaccines outside a group of rich countries that have seized early material. A global program called Covax, which aims to deploy COVID-19 vaccines worldwide, has been awarded contracts with developers including Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca PLC. But some of these sources are expected to come from experimental inoculation from Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline PLC that has been delayed and may not be ready until the end of next year.
“It’s really difficult to make sure we get these vaccines distributed and distributed fairly in a global way, for moral and economic reasons,” said Mark Suzman, senior Foundation officer Bill & Melinda Gates, to reporters on her Dec. 9 call.
Suzman cited research showing that widespread access to vaccines could bring major economic benefits to all countries and save many lives. As rich countries are likely to receive more than enough doses to get their vaccine, they should consider redistributing some supplies to those most in need, he said.
Vaccination has been one of the most successful public health interventions in the world and has played an important role in raising U.S. life expectancy by more than 50% over the last century. About a third of U.S. deaths in 1900 occurred in children under the age of 5, many from diseases such as smallpox, measles and whooping cough that are now vaccine-preventable.
Some new vaccines are also being used quickly and widely, such as pictures that prevent pneumococcal infections that can cause serious illness in children and adults. The introduction of the shingles vaccine has prevented the painful disease from millions of people over the past two decades.
Veteran of the World Health Organization ‘s effort to eradicate smallpox, Orenstein would often vaccinate himself in front of small towns to allay fears of safety. The group decided to try to eradicate the disease in 1959 when it was still suffering from many developing countries, but the effort did not start to gear up until 1967 when WHO and its members promised more money and staff.
The smallpox effort initially focused on whole numbers, but that was inconvenient, recalls William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University infectious disease expert who has advised the government on vaccinations. This came when the strategy turned to identifying issues and then vaccinating everyone nearby, sometimes hundreds of families.
This approach to creating a vaccine cycle around cases was not possible but, because smallpox can be a non-malignant disease, makes it easy to identify, and spreads relatively slowly.
“It has this reputation of spreading fast but spreading relatively slowly,” Schaffner said. “You also need close liaison for the referral to take place.”
These features allowed vaccination teams to identify patients just as they became infectious and exclude all opportunities for referral. Nevertheless, it took two decades for the worldwide effort to stage the last revolution in 1977.
It may be a better comparison with COVID-19 polio, an intestinal virus that sometimes causes chronic, severe infection. Polio is similar to COVID-19 in that only a minority of infected people – about 1 in 100 – become seriously ill.
That has created one of the expected problems in the widespread COVID-19 vaccine: People who do not believe they are vulnerable to the disease may not want to be vaccinated, even if which could benefit others by keeping hospital intensive care units free of charge and possibly preventing the spread of the disease.
An important difference with polio, however, is that it can cause severe infection in young children, leaving them with lifelong paralysis, Orenstein said. That is in contrast to COVID-19, which mainly affects the elderly and the sick. That has left some people incapable.
“We get more than one death per minute – on some days two deaths per minute,” he said. “It is worrying to see a lack of concern in others. ”
But even with a bovine strain paralyzed by polio and vaccines available for about 65 years, that disease has not yet been eradicated globally. Two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan, have yet to disperse due to inadequate vaccination levels, according to the Global Police Abolition Campaign.
To defeat COVID-19, “we need to convince people to get the vaccine,” Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s chief infectious disease expert, said in an interview. “If you have a highly effective vaccine and only 50% of people are taking it, you will not be taking the side effects you need to reduce pandemic to such a low level that it doesn’t. society is no longer threatened. And that is the goal of vaccination, as we did with measles, as we did with polio, as the world did with smallpox. ”
Most routine vaccines provide protection for years to decades. We still don’t know how long COVID-19 vaccines last, Fauci said. And it’s not clear if they prevent transmission along with protection against symptoms, although studies could shed light on that soon.
The supply and supply chain challenge facing the world today is “more complex than usual because for the first time in history we will be introducing several vaccines against the same target at the same time. one time, ”said Rajeev Venkayya, president of Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. vaccine industry, he said in an interview.
That means countries need databases to monitor outbreaks and make sure people get the doses at the right times, as well as systems to monitor for side effects. who could and share the information with the public, he said.
Early on, countries plan to prioritize the most vulnerable as well as health care workers and other critical workers, which will greatly reduce deaths and suffering, said former supporter Venkayya special for biofuels for US President George W. Bush.
“But the transmission won’t go down much in the beginning. This is going to take a considerable amount of time of vaccine-controlled population immunity before we start spoiling the transmission. ”
Perhaps by the middle of next year, countries such as the UK and the US will be able to “see the true spread of broadcasting,” he said. “That timeline will be delayed in many other parts of the world that do not have this kind of early access to vaccines.”
Unvaccinated numbers always threaten to reintroduce disease to areas where herd immunity appears to have taken over. Just last year, the annual number of cases of measles rose more than sixfold worldwide to about 870,000, the most since 1996, as vaccine levels showed.
The world is likely to see the same level of viral resistance from the coronavirus, said Klaus Stohr, a former Novartis AG vaccine action officer and WHO official who encouraged efforts to prepare for pandemics.
“The prediction is very clear: The virus will never be eradicated,” he said. “Why? Because a lot of the population will always tend to be in the community.”
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