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Researchers Race for Corona Vaccine but Question Effectiveness

Researchers Race for Corona Vaccine but Question Effectiveness

The latest COVID-19 information and statistics for the Middle East and North Africa

The race is on for a coronavirus vaccine, with more than 130 in development globally, including 10 in clinical evaluation, according to the World Health Organization.

Out of those 10, there are two leading candidates entering Phase 3 trials in the next month. One from US-based biotech company Moderna and the other a collaboration between the University of Oxford and UK-based biopharmaceutical company AstraZeneca.

“From January when the virus was identified, to going into Phase 3, that’s unprecedented. That has never been done before,” Dr. Anna Durbin, professor of medicine and public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Media Line. “But because of the urgency and the need for a vaccine, that’s why we are proceeding at risk.”

Accelerating the development process doesn’t impact safety. The risk refers to the cost of testing tens of thousands of people for an efficacy study and manufacturing millions and eventually billions of doses before knowing if the vaccine will even work in preventing the coronavirus, Durbin explained.

On Thursday, for example, AstraZeneca announced a $750 million deal with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, to manufacture and distribute 300 million doses of the Oxford vaccine candidate by the end of 2020. AstraZeneca also inked a deal with the Serum Institute of India for one billion doses, with a goal of 400 million by the year’s end.

In normal times, according to Durbin, companies wouldn’t have the financial resources or incentives to accelerate the vaccine development process given the chance that the final product might not even work, but public health officials recognize the extraordinary situation that COVID-19 has presented to the world.

“Even though we are taking a risk that these vaccines won’t work, if we wait three years to go through the entire evaluation process to see if the vaccine induces immunity and which vaccine induces the best immunity, that will take years and probably hundreds of thousands, millions of lives could be lost if we follow the traditional pathway,” Durbin said.

According to Friday’s update from the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, globally there were 6,639,228 infections with 391,261 deaths and 2,872,815 recoveries in 188 countries and territories.

But is rushing a vaccine to market about protecting public health? Not everyone agrees.

“If a vaccine is to be approved, my guess is that it will be approved because there is a rush to get a vaccine. Not to necessarily satisfy the medical problem, but to satisfy political and economic concerns,” Dr. William Haseltine, chair and president of ACCESS Health International, told The Media Line “And that means a vaccine is likely to be partially effective and possibly dangerous because it won’t be thoroughly tested. It cannot be in that amount of time.”

Until there is a completely effective vaccine for COVID-19, Haseltine said that countries in East Asia and other regions have already demonstrated that public health measures such as mass testing can protect the entire population.

Haseltine emphasized that he is a supporter of vaccines as the most effective tools for health that we have, but that realistically by the end of the year there is more of a chance of prophylactic antibodies and drugs being used to prevent infections in high-risk populations.

In the best-case scenario, according to Durbin, Phase 3 clinical trials would demonstrate by mid-to-late fall that a vaccine effectively prevented coronavirus by producing neutralizing antibodies.

However, it would still take a couple of years, in Durbin’s estimation, to manufacture enough doses for the entire population.

“Even if we have an efficacious vaccine by the end of the year, which I do think is possible, we’re going to have to make some decisions about how we prioritize who gets vaccinated and make sure that it’s equitable throughout the world,” Durbin said.

Here are the latest COVID-19 numbers for the Middle East and North Africa as of 7 am GMT on Friday.

Country Confirmed cases Deaths Recovered Active Cases
Afghanistan 18,969 309 1,762 16,898
Algeria 9,831 681 6,297 2,853
Bahrain 13,296 21 7,728 5,547
Cyprus 958 17 790 151
Djibouti 4,054 26 1,685 2,343
Egypt 29,767 1,126 7,756 20,885
Iran 164,270 8,071 127,485 28,714
Iraq 8,840 271 4,338 4,231
Israel 17,562 291 15,026 2,245
Jordan 765 9 566 190
Kuwait 29,921 236 17,223 12,462
Lebanon 1,306 28 731 547
Libya 209 5 52 152
Mauritania 784 31 65 688
Morocco 8,003 208 7,195 600
Oman 14,316 67 3,451 10,798
Pakistan 89,249 1,838 31,198 56,213
Palestinian Territories 464 3 377 84
Qatar 63,741 45 39,468 24,228
Saudi Arabia 93,157 611 68,965 23,581
Somalia 2,204 79 418 1,707
Sudan 5,714 333 1,825 3,556
Syria 124 6 53 95
Tunisia 1,087 49 968 70
Turkey 167,410 4,630 131,778 31,002
United Arab Emirates 37,018 273 19,572 17,173
Yemen 453 103 17 333
Total 783,472 19,367 496,789 267,346

 

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