The chief scientist of the World Health Organization (WHO), Soumya Swaminathan, said today that a ‘young and healthy person’ will have to wait until 2022 to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“People think that on January 1st, 2021, there will be a vaccine and that things will return to normal, but it will not be so. Nobody can produce vaccines in the necessary volumes, so in 2021 we hope to have them, but in a limited quantity”, she said.
She also stressed that there is a consensus that the first immunized against the novel Coronavirus are health workers, first in line in the fight against the Pandemic, and then it will go to the elderly and the most vulnerable people.
She also highlighted that about a dozen possible anti-COVID-19 drugs are currently in phase III of clinical trials in groups of approximately 30,000 people in places where the Coronavirus continues to circulate intensely.
However, she clarified that they will wait until they have all the results of phase III to know “which and how many of these vaccines will be safe, effective, and protect for a long period.”
Must meet safety standards
Soumya Swaminathan predicted that those study conclusions could be ready early next year, but must comply with regulations for the approval of one or more drugs, and warned that nothing should compromise the results obtained since they are vaccines to be used in billions of people, “so we need to be sure that it is the right decision.”
To date, the WHO stated that in total, 40 vaccine trials are in one of the three phases of clinical trials and 200 are in laboratory tests.
