Sat 24 October 2020:
The World Health Organization (WHO) is looking at 10 vaccines in phase three trials as the northern hemisphere with skyrocketing cases faces a critical juncture in the fight against COVID-19, the chief scientist of global body said Friday.
“Our best expectations, as far as we know by watching the trials that are moving ahead, is that we may have results from one or two of the vaccine trials before the end of the year, possibly starting late November,” said Dr. Soumya Swaminathan.
Speaking at a twice-weekly webinar hosted by the WHO, Swaminathan said that this is going to the bare minimum from results considered by regulators to be eligible to be at least looked at for emergency use authorization.
“So, it’s data on efficacy and limited data on safety. Now, based on this, regulators will have to look at the data and decide what to do with it.
“As you know, we have criteria that we put out there, minimum criteria for an emergency use authorization,” she said.
Swaminathan said expectations need to be balanced “because we know that the success rates of vaccine trials are 10 to 20%.”
She said the good thing is there are many candidates in trial, but there will be successes, and there may also be failures.
“We have to be prepared to accept both.”
Rise in the number of cases in Europe
Dr. Mike Ryan, the executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, explained that Europe is experiencing a tremendous rise in the number of cases, increases in hospitalizations, and a tracking upwards of fatalities.
Yet efforts need to be made to keep the fatality rate low.
“When we go back to March, April, May, in the European region, we were seeing far above 50,000 cases a day, with almost 5,000 deaths per day, it was really, really bad from that perspective.
“Now we are seeing now anything up to 200,000 cases a week….And we’re seeing about 2,000 to 2,500 deaths or below that.
“So, and I’m not saying that those deaths won’t catch up; they can, and they are catching up. But there’s still a lot of lives to be saved here,” said Ryan.
