The coronavirus vaccine may require booster for longer protection, according to White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci.
He said that the effect of the potential vaccine on individuals might be short-lived.
Antibodies can help identify how effective a vaccine is, how often a person might need to receive it, or a booster for longer protection.
Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked about how long antibodies can protect people from infection. He said, “we do not know.”
“With this spike protein that’s being presented in the way that we do it with primes and in some cases boosts, we’re going to assume that there’s a degree of protection, but we have to assume that it’s going to be finite,” he noted during a Q&A discussion with Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “It’s not going to be like a measles vaccine.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, mumps, measles, and rubella vaccine generally provide lifelong immunity. However, Dr. Fauci stressed that any potential coronavirus vaccine may not do the same.
“So there’s going to be follow up in those cases to see if we need a boost,” he said. “We may need a boost to continue the protection. But right now we do not know how long it lasts.”
He noted that reports of possible reinfection of recovered Covid-19 patients may not be completely accurate. What is more likely is only fragments of the virus still in the recovered patient’s body have been picked up the test that used to detect Covid-19. But they had not been reinfected, according to Dr. Fauci.
“There are no documented cases where people got better and actually got sick again in the sense of virus replicating,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rare case of an individual who went into remission and relapsed. ... But Francis, I can say with confidence, that it is very unlikely if it’s a common phenomenon.”
He stressed that some other viruses, including Ebola, manifested the ability to reinfect recovered patients.
Dr. Fauci has previously said a coronavirus vaccine might not confer long-term immunity for anyone.
“When you look at the history of coronaviruses — the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold — the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that’s protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year,” he said last month. “That’s not a lot of durability and protection.
However, top US officials said they welcome any protection, especially for vulnerable communities such as health workers and the elderly. These are the ones that will be prioritized through an emergency use authorization when a vaccine has been proven effective in humans.
Dr. Fauci stressed that officials will be able to determine whether a vaccine candidate currently in development is safe and effective by early 2021.
Meanwhile, British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca and US biotech firm Moderna are the two companies have reportedly reached progress with their vaccine candidates.
Moderna will be entering phase three trials before the end of the month. Currently, there are 16 vaccine candidates in human trials around the world, according to the World Health Organization.
“We hope as we go along that by the end of this year or the beginning of 2021, we will at least have an answer whether the vaccine or vaccines, plural, are safe and effective,” Fauci said.
