WHO Official says Vaccines against COVID-19 may not need to be administered annually

program area manr for immunization and vaccine development at World Health Organization's (WHO) Regional Office for Africa, Dr. Richard Mihigo, said that effective vaccines to battle vel coronavirus will t be required to minister annually. After a large investment from US government, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca recently started its late-st trial for a potential coronavirus vaccine. WHO official also spoke about phase 3 clinical trials of several candidate vaccines in South Africa as he said that it is unclear how long it will take for reliable results to be delivered out of tests. 

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Dr. Mihigo said, “It's difficult to predict w for how long effect of vaccine will last. It's true that for flu vaccines, most of time we need to repeat it every year, depending on different strains of virus being seasonal for rth, west, etc. For coronavirus, we believe that it may t necessarily be case”.

He ded, “Our role is to create an enabling environment in which se rapeutics, se vaccines can be tested. And n we observe what will be outcome of such clinical trials. It's very difficult to predict when [we will see] outcome”.

As per a recent press release by AstraZeneca, company will begin with 2 trials comprising 6,000 participants. Also, y have furr plans to d 4,000 more in order to test antibody medicine.

Vaccine trials in process

According to reports by ANI, three vaccine producers are currently conducting trials of vaccines in South Africa- AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and vavax. Speaking about same, Mihigo said, “We do have a few clinical trials currently going on, mainly in South Africa ... AstraZeneca trial started a couple of weeks ago. We have a vavax vaccine that also started in South Africa and, most recently, Johnson&Johnson vaccine that also started in South Africa. Or countries have also been approached - Kenya, Uganda - but clinical trials have t yet started re”.

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After Trump recovered from vel coronavirus, US Government decided to invest an amount of $486 million into British Pharmaceutical company. This amount comes in an dition to $25 million it alrey invested when company’s potential COVID vaccine entered phase I trials. Through this deal US mand to secure hundreds of thousands of doses of experimental treatments by end of 2020.

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