Coronavirus Vaccine In 18 months
The novel coronavirus outbreak that began late December 2019 killed more than 1100 people in China and affected around 45000 across the world, as per the latest reports.
On Tuesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros who attended a news conference on novel coronavirus in Geneva and announced that the new coronavirus 2019-nCoV will be called Covid-19 from now on.
He also informed that the first vaccine for the coronavirus could be available in 18 months. Therefore everything should be done using the available weapons to fight the virus, for now, he said.
“If the world doesn’t want to wake up and consider the virus as public enemy number one, I don’t think we will learn from our lessons,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
WHO asked countries to aggressively fight against the coronavirus. The outbreak may be over by April, said China’s senior medical adviser.
Representatives of China, infectious disease experts, major research funders, bioethicists, member states, and 400 scientists attended WHO’s global research and innovation forum to discuss solutions for the crisis. Establishing a common understanding of the virus and to agree upon governance framework and priorities was the main agenda of the
forum. WHO chief informed in the forum that the coronavirus vaccine may take 18 months to develop. The forum will continue through Wednesday.Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist, who was invited to the meeting held in Geneva told that if coronavirus could not be controlled, the epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population.
The virus’s genome has already been sequenced, and we now have an idea about how it is transmitted. But the source of the outbreak or its natural host is still unknown to experts. A vaccine or treatment for the virus has not found till now, and we are still unaware of its severity and transmissibility. Several scientists in China, Germany, Australia, France, Britain, and the US are trying their best to develop a vaccine that usually takes years. According to the latest reports, it may take 18 months to develop the coronavirus vaccine.
