Dr. Anthony Fauci Says That The Vaccine May Not Provide Long-lasting Immunity

Millions of coronavirus vaccine doses will be going to ready by early 2021. But White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said he worries about the durability of a potential coronavirus vaccine, saying there’s a chance it may not provide long-term immunity. “It likely isn’t going to be a long duration of immunity,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during an interview Tuesday evening with JAMA Editor Howard Bauchner.

Dr. Anthony Fauci Says That The Vaccine May Not Provide Long-lasting Immunity

He said that a coronavirus vaccine will provide some protection against SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, the illness it causes, but is concerned about how long that protection could last. “If you look at the duration of protection when you recover from one of the several benign coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the durability of infection is only measured in a year or less as opposed to the other infections where you can get 15 to 20 years of protection,” he said. 

The US will begin mass-producing the vaccine

The National Institutes of Health has been working with a biotech firm Moderna on a potential vaccine to prevent Covid-19 which has infected more than 6.28 million people worldwide and killed around 375,987 people. Meanwhile, Fauci declared that the US will begin mass-producing the vaccines so it can distribute them once they gain FDA approval.

“We’re going to start manufacturing doses of the vaccines way before we even know that the vaccine works. We may know whether it’s efficacious or not by maybe November or December. Which meany by that time, we hopefully would have close to 100 million doses. And by the beginning of 2021, we hope to have a couple of hundred million doses,” he said.

12 to 18 months since Chinese scientists first identified the coronavirus and mapped its genetic sequence, U.S. officials and scientists are hopeful a vaccine to prevent Covid-19 will be ready in the first half of 2021.

Currently, there are no licensed vaccines for COVID-19 and it is because of the immunological secrets locked up in the long class of coronavirus which was don’t yet understood by scientists and experts. Poland argued against this rush to distribute the coronavirus vaccine by early next year.

They noted that this is not only a risky investment but could do potential harm to those who take it. But scientists are in strict confidence even though they don’t fully understand key aspects of the virus. If a successful vaccine is found and distributed as per experts said, it will be a record-breaking time frame for a process that normally takes about a decade for an effective and safe vaccine.

“You can have everything you think that’s in place and you don’t induce the kind of immune response that turns out to be protective and durably protective. So one of the big unknowns is, will it be effective? Given the way the body responds to viruses of this type, I’m cautiously optimistic that we will with one of the candidates get an efficacy signal,” Fauci said.

The two pieces of information that still misses by researchers are about immunity to the coronavirus: whether everybody who gets infected develops immunity, and how long does that protection last.