Why we won’t feel the full impact of vaccines until next year

There’s a lot of hope pinned to vaccines, but it’s important that people understand that even if a vaccine is authorized soon, we won’t fully feel the effects of it until next year. It will take time to vaccinate the initial groups of people and frontline workers with the required two doses that many of the early vaccine candidates require, according to former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

 

“The vaccine is not going to affect the contours of what we’re going to go through in the next two or three months,” he said.

 

So even if we have a vaccine, we won’t be able to let up on masking and physical distancing in the near future.

What’s also important to note is that we won’t know from the vaccine trials if these vaccines will actually save lives. Rather, the ongoing trials are only designed to show if the vaccines prevent infection – and most infections are mild, said Peter Doshi, a drug development specialist at the University of Maryland.

 

"None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus," Doshi wrote in the the medical journal BMJ.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said this week, “The primary thing you want to do is that if people get infected, prevent them from getting sick, and if you prevent them from getting sick, you will ultimately prevent them from getting seriously ill.”

Fauci agreed that a vaccine which prevents infection would be even better.

“If the vaccine also allows you to prevent initial infection, that would be great,” he said, “But what I would settle for – and all of my colleagues would settle for – is the primary endpoint to prevent clinically recognizable disease.”