Lois Privor-Dumm, Naor Bar-Zeev and Maria Deloria Knoll of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health write in STAT that developing an effective vaccine will not be enough to beat the pandemic. It must be delivered to be fully effective.
The lesson learned from a long history of using vaccines to fight massively disruptive diseases like smallpox and Ebola is that the vaccine itself is not enough. Like a good punch line, it’s all about the delivery, they write.
The smallpox vaccine was an average one with a limited supply. But small, dedicated teams implemented a winning strategy for it. They focused on rapidly identifying individuals with smallpox and then vaccinating people in their circle or “ring” of potential contacts, creating a cordon of immunity that kept the disease out. The same strategy was recently employed with impressive results in the fight against Ebola.
Today, all eyes are on efforts to develop a treatment to immunize people against Covid-19. And the pace of progress has been impressive. Just a few months after the disease crossed the Rubicon from bats to humans, its genetic code has been sequenced and published, diagnostic tests are available, and vaccine development is well underway. There are now many candidates at various stages in the pipeline.
Experts predict a year or more before we have an approved vaccine. Although that can seem like an eternity to many, it would be the fastest development in history.