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October 28, 2020 "If governments do not prepare vaccination plans immediately, we risk slowing the process by 4-5 months and paying for inaction, just as today we are paying for some mistakes of the recent past".

To say this, in an interview with Repubblica, is Guido Rasi, executive director of EMA, the European Medicines Agency based in Amsterdam for 9 years, which will have to give the green light to the marketing of vaccines in Europe.

Rasi criticizes those who talk about the vaccine by Christmas: "Technically it is still possible, but it is extremely difficult if not unlikely. The pharmaceutical companies have not yet presented the clinical data of the trials and we are practically in November. If everything goes smoothly we will be able to authorize the first vaccines between January and February. We have three that have completed or are about to complete the third phase of the trial: Moderna, AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Now they have to analyze the data and compact them. If by the end of November they send us clear and unambiguous information we will be able to make it right in late January and early February. Then we could immediately start vaccinating the risk categories ", while for the rest of the population" it can be assumed for mid 2021. Or better: by the summer we will begin to have enough vaccinated to see the effects on pandemic".

But in Europe, he explains, "to vaccinate 400 million people you need 500-600 million doses and having them by the end of next year will not be possible".



Rasi, however, is cautiously optimistic: "Even if today it is not possible to predict when we will reach mass immunity, I am sure we will defeat the virus. But the speed depends on the efficiency of the vaccines, the goodness of the vaccination plans of the governments, those for communication aimed at convincing people to get vaccinated and monitoring to calibrate vaccination strategies and increase their effectiveness. Surely at the end of 2021 we will have a much more manageable life: we could completely defeat Sars-Cov2 with mass immunity or its mutations could make it similar to the normal flu, with the need to prepare a vaccine a year. "