Modern CEO Stephane Bancel
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The CEO of vaccine maker Covid-19, Moderna, warned on Wednesday that the coronavirus that has halted global economies and overwhelmed hospitals will exist “forever.”
Public health officials and infectious disease experts have said there is a high chance that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, meaning that it will be present in communities at all times, albeit probably at lower levels. that now.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel seemed to agree on Wednesday that Covid-19 will become endemic, saying “SARS-CoV-2 will not go away”.
“We believe we will live with this virus forever,” he said during a roundtable at the JPMorgan Health Conference.
Health officials will need to continuously monitor new variants of the virus so that scientists can produce vaccines to fight them, he said. Ohio researchers said Wednesday they discovered two new variants that would likely originate in the United States and that one of them quickly became the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-week period in late December. and early January.
Pfizer researchers said its vaccine developed with BioNTech appeared to be effective against a key mutation in the UK strain, as well as a variant found in South Africa.
The Moderna vaccine has been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for use in Americans over the age of 18. Additional studies still needed to be completed in children, whose immune systems may respond differently to vaccines than adults.
U.S. officials are competing to distribute doses of both vaccines, but it is likely that months will pass before the U.S. can vaccinate enough people to get herd immunity, meaning the virus will not have enough new hosts to spread. . Still, Bancel said Wednesday that it expects the United States to be one of the first major countries to achieve “sufficient protection” against the virus.
There are already four endemic coronaviruses worldwide, but they are not as contagious or deadly as Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization.