The advent of an effective vaccine could mean a return to normalcy by next winter, argues Professor Uğur Şahin, Professor of Oncology at the University of Mainz and Chief Executive and Co-Founder of BioNTech, the biotech firm that is partnered with Pfizer in the development of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate which recently demonstrated an efficacy of over 90% in Phase 3 clinical trials.
The pair of companies is now taking steps to roll out the candidate to countries around the world before the end of the year, should they be successful in securing international regulatory approval. But the real impact of a vaccine isn’t likely to be felt until sometime next year.
Şahin told to BBC: “We will not have a big impact on the infection numbers with our vaccine this winter. If everything continues to go well, we will start to deliver the vaccine at the end of this year, beginning of next year.
“Our goal is to deliver more than 300 million vaccine doses until April next year, which could allow us to only start to make an impact,” he added.
“The bigger impact will happen until summer. Summer will help us anyway, because the infection rate will go down in summer, and what is absolutely essential is that we get a high vaccination rate until, or before, autumn/winter next year.
“So that means all the immunisation vaccination approaches must be accomplished before next autumn,” he continued. “And I’m confident that this will happen because there are a number of vaccine companies helping us to increase the supply, and so we could have a normal winter next year.”