Reuters
National Interest: Why A Coronavirus Vaccine May Be Years Away
Dr. Paul Offit, Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, says, “I don’t see eighteen months—Dr. Anthony Fauci could see something I don’t here, he is certainly closer to it—but I think eighteen months is a very, very, very optimistic timeline.”
Jacob Heilbrunn: How does the COVID-19 crisis end?
Paul Offit: German chancellor Angela Merkel said it best: “We need to get to a doubling time of longer than ten days.” The number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by COVID-19, those doubling intervals, is more than ten days. For example, on March 26 we had one thousand deaths; on March 28, two thousand. That’s a doubling time of two days. By April 1 we had four thousand deaths. That means we had a doubling time of four days. If you can get to a ten-day doubling time, it is likely that hospital discharges will exceed admissions and you can say that you accomplished what you wanted—no longer overwhelming the healthcare system. That’s what you are worried about—not that you can’t take care of these patients, but that you can’t take care of any patients.
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WNU Editor: My brother works in the bio-tech industry, and he is very knowledgeable on these things. He agrees with Dr. Paul Offit. Making a vaccine takes time, and as my brother put it to me tonight, he would not take any vaccine until it has been thoroughly tested. And it does not stop there. Once a vaccine has been developed and tested, it will take time to manufacture and distribute it. To say that this is distressing is an understatement. I know that no major government in the world is going to make a major economic and/or political decision until this is resolved. Bottom line. This pandemic and the restrictions that have been imposed on the world may last well into 2021.
