Modern CEO Stephane Bancel
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The CEO of Covid-19 vaccine maker Moderna warned Wednesday that the coronavirus that has brought global economies to a halt and overwhelmed hospitals will last “forever”.
Public health officials and infectious disease experts have said Covid-19 is likely to become an endemic disease, meaning it will be present in communities at all times, although likely at lower levels than it is now. is.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel appeared on Wednesday to agree that Covid-19 will become endemic, saying, “SARS-CoV-2 is not going away.”
“We will live with this virus forever, we think,” he said during a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.
Health officials will have to constantly be on the lookout for new variants of the virus so scientists can produce vaccines to combat them, he said. Researchers in Ohio said on Wednesday that they discovered two new varieties likely to be from the US, and one of them quickly became the dominant species in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-week period in late December and early January.
Pfizer researchers said the vaccine developed with BioNTech was found to be effective against a major mutation in the British strain and against a variant found in South Africa.
Moderna’s vaccine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in Americans 18 and older. In children, whose immune systems may respond differently to vaccines than in adults, additional studies need to be performed.
US officials are racing to distribute doses of both vaccines, but it will likely take months for the US to vaccinate enough people to achieve herd immunity, meaning the virus won’t have enough new hosts to spread. Still, Bancel said on Wednesday that he expects the US to be one of the first major countries to offer “adequate protection” against the virus.
There are already four coronaviruses that are endemic around the world, but they are not as contagious or deadly as Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization.