Experts say a vaccine against the new coronavirus could be ready to be tested in people as soon as April, but how soon until it'll be widely available?
against that virus, and therefore to be ready to fight off any actual infection from that virus, says Tal Zaks, MD, PhD, chief medical officer of Moderna Inc., the Cambridge, MA-based biotechnology company that is rushing to develop an mRNA vaccine against the new coronavirus.
The vaccine appeared to generate a robust immune response comparable to one in people who had recovered from the virus, he says. , seem to suffer more from the new coronavirus, accounting for most severe illnesses and deaths, according to the CDC.SARS killed about 10% of all people it infected -- but roughly half of those over 50, says Vineet Menachery, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston whose work is focused on coronavirus vaccines. In those cases, the infected people’s immune systems overreacted, and fluid accumulated in their lungs, he says.
With SARS, Fauci says, the first-line study showed the candidate vaccine was safe and created an appropriate immune response, “but then the epidemic essentially disappeared,” so it was never needed.That lack of follow-through frustrates Peter Hotez, MD, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
It’s short-sighted, he says, to worry about the price of developing a vaccine, when an epidemic like the current one in China costs orders of magnitude more. “If we had gotten that very modest investment, we would have had a vaccine ready to go,” he says. Until a safe, effective vaccine can be developed, the best protection remains hand-washing, says Jeanne Marrazzo, MD, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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