Vaccines alone won’t be enough to conquer COVID-19, UNC infectious disease doc says
People have begun talking about a potential end to the coronavirus crisis, as first one and now three vaccines for COVID-19 have shown promising results in clinical trials.
But an infectious disease specialist at UNC says vaccines alone won’t be enough to defeat the coronavirus. Dr. David Wohl says doctors will still need medicines to treat people who get sick with COVID-19 despite the availability of vaccines.
“A vaccine will not completely get us out of it. It really won’t,” Wohl said in an interview. “There’ll still be people getting sick. There’ll still be people dying. We still need good treatments, and that’s why I think the treatment work has to continue as well.”
Wohl and others at UNC have been helping test both a vaccine and treatments for COVID-19. UNC is a test site for a vaccine developed by Moderna, which early testing shows is both safe and effective at preventing COVID-19 in adults, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Among volunteers across the country who took either the Moderna vaccine or a placebo, 95 developed COVID-19. All but five of them had received the placebo, meaning the vaccine was about 95% effective.
A vaccine developed by Pfizer has also shown to be 95% effective in initial clinical trials, while AstraZeneca announced Monday that its vaccine was 62% or 90% effective, depending on how it was administered.
The results are hopeful, Wohl says, though questions remain about whether the vaccines are safe and effective over the long-term and whether they prevent infections in people who don’t develop any symptoms.
If and when the vaccines pass those tests and get approved for widespread use, there will still be a need for COVID-19 treatments, Wohl says. A vaccine may not work in everyone, he says, and many people simply won’t get it.
Less than 52% of children and adults in the United States were vaccinated against the flu last year, despite the wide availability of a flu vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While most flu cases can be treated with rest, hydration and over-the-counter medications, doctors can also use antiviral drugs in people with severe cases or underlying health conditions.
Even then, flu is blamed for thousands of deaths in the United States each year.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved some treatments for coronavirus on an emergency basis, but the results have been mixed, Wohl says.
The steroid dexamethasone has helped with inflammation in severe cases of COVID, while remdesivir has proved less effective than hoped when it was approved for emergency use in May. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization recommended against using remdesivir with hospitalized COVID patients because there was no evidence that it was helping them.
“We really don’t have good therapies,” Wohl said. “We really don’t.”
Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for the first outpatient COVID treatment. The drug bamlanivimab, developed by Eli Lilly and tested at UNC among other places, is used to treat mild to moderate COVID-19 after initial testing showed patients who used it had less coronavirus in their noses and were less likely to be hospitalized.
“All good signs,” Wohl said. “Not exactly a slam dunk.”
COVID-19 had killed about 258,000 Americans and nearly 1.4 million people worldwide as of Tuesday, according to the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University. More than 170,000 new coronavirus cases a day on average have been diagnosed in the U.S., according to The New York Times.
Wohl said the news about vaccines makes him as optimistic about an end to coronavirus pandemic as ever but says the quest for treatments must continue.
“I think without treatments, vaccines will not get us there all the way,” he said. “And same thing for treatments without vaccines. We need both ends of the spectrum.”
This story was originally published November 24, 2020 at 11:59 AM with the headline "Vaccines alone won’t be enough to conquer COVID-19, UNC infectious disease doc says."
