Don’t expect the coronavirus pandemic to end anytime soon, U.S. and international public health officials say, despite the nascent vaccine rollout.
“These vaccines are not a silver bullet that will end the pandemic in the near future,” the World Health Organization’s Takeshi Kasai, the agency’s lead official for the Western Pacific, told reporters.
A string of regulatory approvals for vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna has raised hopes that the worst of the pandemic could soon pass, but the production and distribution of the vaccine is a major task in its own right. And officials remain uncertain about whether the inoculation provides a hard stop to the spread of the infection or simply protects the recipient from a severe case of the disease.
“We don’t know whether somebody who had the vaccine could still acquire the virus without any symptoms and potentially be contagious to others around them,” U.S. National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said in a televised Sunday interview. “If you’ve had the vaccine … you still need to wear the mask. You still need to think of yourself as potentially contagious, even though you are protected from getting sick at a very high percentage of certainty.”
Kasai agreed, saying: “Tired as we all are of this pandemic, we must stick to the actions and behaviors which protect not only ourselves but also those around us: hand washing, mask wearing, physical distancing, and avoiding places that have a high risk of transmission.”
Such guidance could remain in place even longer for many developing countries in the Pacific than for Americans.
Kasai predicted that vaccines would be available to high-risk people “in all countries around the world” by the end of 2021, but it could be another year beyond that for lower-risk groups.
“For others, beyond those high-risk groups, we may be looking for another 12 to 24 months before the majority of people have received this vaccine, and even then, there is some uncertainty and unknowns,” he said.
