Coronavirus: Experts warn COVID-19 vaccine will reach global coverage by end of 2023

Analysis of existing COVID-19 vaccines development and manufacture scaleup suggest that it could be until September 2023 before there are enough doses of a successful vaccine for the whole world, according to findings by the Center for Global Development (CDG).

The CDG released a report earlier this month that used model projections to analyze the probabilities for developing and producing a successful vaccine.

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According to the experts, the probability that a stringent regulator approves at least one vaccine by the end of the year is currently less than two percent. The probability of a vaccine increases to 50 percent by the end of April 2021 and 85 percent by the end of 2022, and 98 percent by the end of 2022.

“Based on the Operation Warp Speed and CEPI portfolios as of September 2020, the model predicts a 78 percent chance that at least one of the Operation Warp Speed–funded vaccines will succeed and a 67 percent chance that at least one of the CEPI–funded vaccines will succeed,” read the report by CDG.

“The model predicts a less than a 1 percent probability that no vaccine is approved from the current global portfolio, based on the inputs we derived from expert interviews. If, however, we use the more pessimistic inputs from experts, this rises to almost 20 percent,” the report authored by several experts added.

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The report said that experts did not expect that first-generation vaccines will reduce individuals’ infection risk enough to engender herd immunity and bring the pandemic to an end.

“Other public health measures will have to continue. Our experts believed that later vaccines will probably be more efficacious than earlier ones and that we will likely not get a vaccine that does everything we need it to,” the authors wrote.

Recently, Johnson & Johnson said it expects to resume its trial in the United States on Monday or Tuesday and remains on track to produce data from the trial on the vaccines' effectiveness by the end of 2020 or early 2021, J&J's chief scientific officer Paul Stoffels said.

AstraZeneca, one of the leading vaccine developers, paused its US trial on September 6 after a report of a serious neurological illness, believed to be transverse myelitis, in a participant in the company's UK trial. J&J paused its large, late-stage trial last week after a study participant became ill. AstraZeneca resumed the trial on Friday.

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(With Reuters)