Sep 27, 2020,08:00am EDT Bruce Japsen Senior Contributor
Director of the National Institute of Allergy
and[+]
POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
With four vaccines against Covid-19 in the final stage of U.S.
clinical trials and a fifth on its way, Dr. Anthony Fauci sees the potential
for vaccines to hold promise in some patient populations better than others.
Fauci said late last week he remains optimistic about vaccines
in their final stage of development and he believes Americans will begin to be
vaccinated in November and December. And as vaccines are approved, researchers
may find that one works better on one population than others.
“There may be different vaccines for different situations,”
Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, told Dr. Howard Bauchner, editor of JAMA during an interview Friday
afternoon.
Fauci made his comments a day after Maryland-based Novavax
said it would begin phase 3 clinical trials of its coronavirus
vaccine in the United Kingdom. Fauci said the Novavax vaccine is expected to
begin final stage clinical trials in the U. S. in October.
“We have the first four and one more, Novavax, is going into a
phase 3 trial,”Fauci said. “We have a bunch of candidates going.”
The Novavax trial is the fifth supported by the U.S.
government’s “Operation Warp Speed” effort designed to quickly bring vaccines
against Covid-19 to market. Novavax, which has never brought a vaccine to
market, was awarded a $1.6 billion
grant to produce 100 million dosages of a coronavirus vaccine
by early next year.
The four other vaccines against Covid-19 in final-stage U.S.
clinical trials are being developed by Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson
and AstraZeneca, providing several options should one not be as effective as
another.
“You might find when you do a clinical trial, that you maybe
have three or four vaccines that are effective,” Fauci told JAMA’s Bauchner.
“But you may find one that does better in an older population
than another,” Fauci added. “It could be that you would recommend, that if you
are an older person you get this vaccine versus that. That is something we wish
for namely that we have enough vaccines that you can tailor the better one for
each individual group.”
Watch the entire video of JAMA’s interview with Fauci that
included a detailed update on Covid-19 vaccine development:
No comments:
Post a Comment