Coronavirus vaccine could be ready for emergency use within months, says Chinese expert Zhong Nanshan
- Respiratory diseases specialist says developing herd immunity will cost millions of lives, so the only way to defeat Covid-19 is to inoculate people
- Zhong says vaccines for use in emergencies could be ready by autumn but large-scale use may be up to two years away
Zhong’s estimate echoed last month’s comments by Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, that it was drafting guidelines to determine who would be eligible to receive the vaccine, when to take them, and what would constitute emergency use.
The head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Antony Fauci, has made similar comments, saying 100 million doses might be ready by the end of the year even before the end of clinical trials.
Zhong said herd immunity without intervention could not be achieved without a high death toll, making inoculation the only feasible means of gaining herd immunity.
“Natural immunity needs 60 to 70 per cent of a country’s population to be infected by the novel coronavirus, which could cause a death toll of 30 to 40 million,” Zhong told a live event hosted by tech giant Baidu. “The [only] solution is still mass vaccination.”
“[Herd immunity] still depends on the development of vaccines. Large-scale vaccination will take one to two years. The new vaccine can be used in an emergency as early as this autumn or the end of the year.”