As drugmakers across the world race to develop a coronavirus vaccine, White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said, “There’s no guarantee that the vaccine is actually going to be effective.”
Fauci delivered the somber warning Tuesday to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions during a hearing about the road to reopening businesses across the nation. U.S. officials have pointed to the development of a vaccine as a key turning point in the Covid-19 pandemic, even though it will take at least 12 to 18 months.
As experimental vaccines are created, they will also need to be mass produced to be administered to the more than 7.6 billion people around the world. In the meantime, there are no proven treatments for the virus.
Fauci’s comments highlight another complexity in the path to a vaccine.
“You can have everything you think that’s in place and you don’t induce the kind of immune response that turns out to be protective and durably protective,” Fauci said of a vaccine. “So one of the big unknowns is, will it be effective? Given the way the body responds to viruses of this type, I’m cautiously optimistic that we will with one of the candidates get an efficacy signal.”
