Earlier this week, ten months into the coronavirus pandemic, the German pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced that its vaccine was showing extraordinary promise in Phase Three trials.
Arutz Sheva spoke with Professor Daniel Shepshlovich of Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv to hear his impressions regarding this development and understand what it could mean for the future.
“First of all, these are preliminary results,” he stresses, “but we do hope that there will be an FDA-approved vaccine within the next few months. In addition, it’s likely that other companies also in the middle of Phase Three randomized controlled trials will be publishing comparable results in the next few weeks. So maybe, in retrospect, we’ll see that this was the first day of the beginning of the end of the pandemic – which is great.”
For Israel, at this point in time, however, Pfizer’s announcement has little practical import, as the government has yet to make any vaccine purchases.
“A lot of countries have already signed deals with Pfizer,” Shepshelovich says. “Israel still doesn’t have a signed deal, but the government is trying to secure several million doses from Pfizer, and we hope they’ll arrive by mid-2021. I believe that we’ll also gain access to products from other international companies,” he adds.
Regarding Israel efforts to produce a home-grown vaccine, he notes that “it’s of course always better to have several options available. If we succeed, it will also be proof that Israel is capable of producing something of this order.”
Producing enough doses for the global population is certainly going to be a challenge, especially if the vaccine has to be administered every year, or even more often, but Professor Shepshelovich is optimistic that this won’t be necessary.
“We’re still not sure, as this is a new virus, but it does look like a one-time vaccination will take care of a large part of this pandemic,” he says. “Of course, it’s also hard to predict how much impact mutations will have. We know already that there are mutations, but we don’t know yet if they will require yearly adjustments to the vaccine. However, at this point it seems that it won’t be like flu, whose vaccine needs to be given every year – it will be more like measles, just once and you’re done.”
Professor Shepshelovich also mentions some of the unique aspects of this pandemic, which has led to, “better communication between countries, more sharing of information. We’ve learned a lot over the last months, dealing with a new disease – something that doesn’t happen too often – and gradually we’ve developed better ways of treating patients, learning when to intubate, which drugs to administer, giving us better results.
“This is still a dangerous disease,” he adds, “and having a vaccine will be great news.”