United States top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci along with other health experts has suggested that there could be a need for more than one vaccine in order to effectively fight the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
According to Fauci, who is currently the director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, the need for more than one vaccine is due to production limitations and overwhelming demand.
In a paper has published in the online journal Science, which was co-authored by Fauci, the demand for the effective vaccine for coronavirus is most likely to exceed the available supply of any single vaccine. The said paper was written by Fauci alongside colleagues at the National Institute of Health (NIH) including Dr. John Mascola, who is an expert on vaccines and NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins. Moreover, Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center's Dr. Larry Corey was also one of the authors.
It was stated in the paper that, "There is an unprecedented need to manufacture and distribute enough safe and effective vaccine to immunize an extraordinarily large number of individuals." Thus the authors said that there is no single vaccine or any vaccine platform alone that is going to be able to meet the global demand which is why it is critical to have a strategic approach to the multi-pronged endeavor.
Race to COVID-19 Vaccine Development
Even with the fact that there are currently several vaccine which are in development the scientists have warned that there are challenges in developing even just a single vaccine. Furthermore, the time difference between developing the vaccine and for them to be available to the public usually takes years, however, they are hopeful that a coronavirus vaccine will be concocted in record time.
Coronavirus vaccine development has received massive amounts of funding and is also being supported by partnerships between government agencies and private pharmaceutical companies in order to speed up the development. NIH's "ACTIV" initiate also supports vaccine development, yet scientists and experts believe that there might be a need for additional funds in order to successfully create a vaccine that will meet demands on a global scale.
In a press release, Dr. Corey said that they want to see multiple vaccines and vaccine platforms be developed in order to meet the need to globally immunize billions of adults and children and to fully restore the world which has seemingly come to a pause as the virus spread.
It was also noted on the paper that the spiked-shaped protein in the virus which it uses to attach to cells has had only relatively few mutations. Thus, this gives optimism that any vaccines which are currently being produced will still effectively ward off the virus once they are released into the population.
In addition, Dr. Collins said that there are already multiple candidate vaccines that may be successfully developed that offer distinct benefits and will be effective for different people.
However, the authors stressed that any effective vaccine that will be developed will require "the vaccine-manufacturing capacity of the entire world" in order to meed the global need.
