Cost, schedule ... the responses of a virologist on vaccines against the coronavirus

ANALYSIS

The race for the vaccine against the coronavirus has just seen two significant advances: Pfizer and BioNTech announced last week that their candidate provided 90% proof of effectiveness.

Monday noon, the Moderna laboratory said that its vaccine was effective at 94.5%.

Should we really be optimistic about the first half of 2021?

How will these vaccines be deployed in France?

Marie-Paule Kieny, virologist and president of the Covid-19 Vaccine Committee, brings valuable answers to Europe 1 on Monday on the major health issue of the coming months.

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What global calendar for the first vaccines?

Can we hope for a vaccine in the first quarter of 2021, when Moderna plans to apply for marketing authorization "in the coming weeks" in the United States?

"From a formal point of view, what will give this starting signal will be the authorization by health regulatory authorities, by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States and the European Medicines Agency (EMA ) in Europe ", indicates Marie-Paule Kieny at the microphone of Patrick Cohen.

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"When is this decision expected? We must not consider that the decision has already been made," continues the vaccinologist.

"It is likely given the results that have been announced but until it is announced it does not exist."

BioNTech and Pfizer announced "that they still need two or three weeks to collect the safety information the US FDA wants to see before making a decision."

This information could therefore be available "at the end of November". 

When will the first French people be vaccinated?

In the first months of 2021, there should be several vaccines available on the market.

“We expect to have more than one vaccine and that is good news. First, a single producer would not be able to produce enough vaccine to vaccinate everyone we want to immunize. Second, these vaccines could have different characteristics. We could have vaccines that are very effective in young people and less effective in vulnerable and elderly people that we would like to protect. Some would be more effective than others at blocking transmission from people who would be infected despite vaccination. "

For Marie-Paule Kieny, the first French people to be vaccinated could be "probably at the very beginning of the year" 2021. "Very likely, as in other countries, the first priorities for this vaccination would be, on the one hand, workers frontline workers who work in the health system (…) and the most vulnerable, the elderly, people with underlying non-communicable diseases. " 

How many vaccines will be available?

The newspaper

advance Monday morning that 90 million doses have already been secured by the government from seven suppliers, which would theoretically allow nearly 45 million people to be vaccinated.

"You should know that we are not sure that all these doses are successful, since we still have uncertainties about the effectiveness of these vaccines," tempers the virologist.

Many gray areas still remain.

"This is why France, like other countries, has chosen to buy a portfolio of products so that, in the end, we use the best. For the moment, we do not don't know how many doses we will have yet. "

What devices for this vaccination made in France?

The chair of the Vaccine-19 Committee provides details on how these vaccination campaigns should unfold in the coming months.

"The strategies currently developed are strategies which will use the conventional means that we have to vaccinate in France," she says, convinced that we will not see the army and the vaccination tents again as we have seen for vaccination against H1N1 flu.

"Our fellow citizens had been very unconvinced by these systems and prefer to be vaccinated by their general practitioner, by those they usually see and so this is probably what we will use for vaccination campaigns." 

How to fight against mistrust?

According to a poll published last week, only 54% of French people said they "totally agree" or "tend to agree" to the idea of ​​being vaccinated against the coronavirus.

"As we know, the French are the world champions of vaccine-skepticism", laments the specialist.

How to respond to this mistrust?

"We will have to be transparent with the French and tell them what we know and what we don't know."

Marie-Paule Kieny cites the risks of this vaccination as an example: "The vaccines that we see and which are progressing, according to what we have seen in the first clinical trials in humans, are what we call fairly reactogenic. This means that, like other vaccines, they induce pain at the injection site, swelling, headaches, sometimes nausea. These side effects are generally short-lived, from 24 to 48 maximum hours. It is not yet known whether they could induce more serious side effects in a very small proportion of those vaccinated. "

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Should we fear a very expensive vaccine?

Moderna and Pfizer have produced new generation vaccines, using the messenger RNA technique, which makes them very expensive products with prices that could reach several tens of euros per dose.

"Prices vary depending on the country where the vaccine was sold," said the president of the Covid-19 Vaccine Committee.

"The fact that this is a new technology should not justify a higher price. The prices will be fixed on several criteria. Some of the manufacturers, like AstraZeneca, have announced that they want to make the price at cost or not far from the cost price during the pandemic and that they reserved the possibility, after the pandemic, of having a market price. Other producers, like Moderna and BioNTech, announced that they wanted a market price from the start. price is being negotiated and final prices are not public at this time. "

When is the return to normal going?

This is, basically, the main question related to this large-scale vaccination: when can we resume a normal life or almost?

Professor Ugur Sahin, the founder of BioNTech, estimated that this would probably take place in a year, for the winter of 2021-2022, once the vaccination campaigns have passed.

"It's difficult to make predictions with Sars-CoV-2 and Covid, everything is so new. We sometimes see cookie-cutter claims leading to results that contradict them. I think we have to remain humble vis-à-vis what we do not know ", qualifies first Marie-Paule Kieny.

"Being positive, one can think that if the vaccines are as effective as one feels they could be and if the French accept the vaccination, one could arrive at a situation where the vulnerable people will be protected for the end of the year, ”she says.

"We could therefore return to a more normal life without believing that we will be able to eradicate the virus. Surely not! We will therefore have to 'live with'. But we could live with it in better conditions."