There are around seven or eight “top” candidates for a vaccine to combat Covid-19 and work on them is being accelerated, according to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. He said the original thinking two months ago was that it may take 12 to 18 months for a vaccine to be developed. Last week, he said an accelerated effort is under way, helped by $8 billion pledged by leaders from 40 countries, organizations and banks for research, treatment and testing. “Since January, WHO has been working with thousands of researchers all over the world to accelerate and track vaccine development from developing animal models to clinical trial designs and everything in between,” he said.
That sounds like good news for a global economy flattened by Covid-19. The Asian Development Bank said the pandemic could inflict losses in the global economy of up to $8.8 trillion. The head of the International Labor Organization said 305 million full-time jobs will be lost around the world by June 30. ILO Director-General Guy Ryder compared this to the 22 million full-time jobs lost when the financial crisis hit in 2008 to 2009, which means the pandemic is not only killing people but also ravaging livelihoods as well. Economists said any recovery is likely to be subdued until a vaccine or effective treatments have tamed the virus.
As people all over the world hope that a vaccine will eventually be developed, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said this might not come at all. He wrote in The Daily Mail on Sunday: “I said we would throw everything we could at finding a vaccine. There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might not come to fruition.”
That no effective vaccine will be developed for Covid-19 despite the huge global effort to produce one is a worst-case possibility nobody is prepared to accept. If a vaccine can’t be produced, life will not go back to the good old days. In a World Economic Forum article—“Coronavirus: What if a vaccine doesn’t work?”—medical experts Tammy Hoffman and Paul Glasziou raise their concerns over the lack of contingency planning if a vaccine isn’t found, and what alternatives the global community should consider.
The world has bet most of its research funding on finding a vaccine and effective drugs. That effort is vital, they said, but it must be accompanied by research on how to target and improve the nondrug interventions that are the only things that work so far.
In an article published in edition.cnn.com—“What happens if a coronavirus vaccine is never developed? It has happened before”—author Rob Picheta said in 1984, the US Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler announced at a press conference in Washington, D.C., that scientists had successfully identified the virus that later became known as HIV—and predicted that a preventative vaccine would be ready for testing in two years. “Nearly four decades and 32 million deaths later, the world is still waiting for an HIV vaccine.”
Dr. David Nabarro, a professor of global health at Imperial College London, who also serves as a special envoy to the World Health Organization on Covid-19 said: “There are some viruses that we still do not have vaccines against. We can’t make an absolute assumption that a vaccine will appear at all, or if it does appear, whether it will pass all the tests of efficacy and safety.”
As countries all over the world are announcing their plans to emerge from virus-inflicted lockdowns, medical experts are also pushing governments to implement an awkward new way of living and interacting to buy the world time in the months, years or decades until a vaccine can eliminate Covid-19. “It is absolutely essential to work on being Covid-ready,” Nabarro said. He called for a new “social contract” in which citizens in every country, while starting to go about their normal lives, take personal responsibility to self-isolate if they show symptoms or come into contact with a potential Covid-19 case because the virus could be with us for many years into the future.