There will be no vaccine rescue this winter

Linda J. Dodson

Pfizer has triggered the latest “fear-of-missing-out” rally with talk that its joint vaccine with the German group BioNTech will be ready for full release by the end of the year.

Let us hope so. But remember that they are experimenting with “quick-and-dirty” messenger RNA that provokes the immune system into a response. Moderna is working on a similar messenger RNA.

This gene-based biotech leapfrogs the normal laborious process and avoids the need for a costly production of the vaccine from hens’ eggs. Yet mRNA is famously unstable and hard to manage. No such vaccines have ever been approved for human use. We don’t know how effective they will be, or how long any immunity will last.

The US federal immunization panel says the Pfizer vaccine must be transported in ‘cool boxes’ and stored at deep freeze temperatures of minus 94 degrees. It must be used within 24 hours once thawed. The vaccine will require special distribution sites.

Pfizer is not part of the US government’s Operation Warp Speed. It is effectively going solo. The fast-track mRNA vaccine is not about the money, says chief executive Albert Bourla. You could have fooled me.

Assuming that this logistical headache can be managed at scale, people will need two shots 21 days apart. Even in the best of all worlds, this leaks well into 2021.

The question then is how many agree to be vaccinated. A Deutsche Bank survey found that three quarters of US residents think the process has been politicised. Almost half the French are anti-vaxxers. Sceptics are not necessarily wrong to be suspicious of a rushed vaccine. An early hopeful for the original Sars coronavirus made it even more lethal in mice.

Richard Hatschett, head of the global vaccine alliance CEPI, fears disaster if one producer (Russia perhaps?) jumps the gun and releases a bad product that shatters confidence.

There is always the worry of random stochastic deaths, the grim reaper syndrome. Three people died in one day during the US swine flu vaccination campaign in 1976. Later investigation concluded that cases had nothing to do with the vaccine but by then the damage was done. The campaign collapsed. And that was before the era of fake news, Twitter, and cyber hysteria – that is to say, before the breakdown of civilisation.

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