Acclaimed American public health expert Ashish Jha has told former Congress president Rahul Gandhi that three vaccine candidates are showing promising results in the fight against the raging coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and expressed confidence that there could be a new vaccine by next year.
“Three vaccine candidates are showing promising results. These are from America, China, and Oxford University. For now, they all seem promising and maybe one or all of them may turn out to be effective. I’m confident that the vaccine will be available by next year. India has to prepare a plan on how to avail the vaccines for its population,” he added.
Jha is a professor of Global Health at TH Chan School of Public Health and director, Harvard Global Health Institute. He made the remarks during his interaction with Gandhi, who has been holding a series of dialogues with global experts on various aspects of Covid-19 via video-conference since the viral outbreak.
Asked by Gandhi, if the Bacillus Calmette–Guérin (BCG) vaccine, which is used against meningitis and tuberculosis in children, is helpful and the virus doesn’t operate in hot weather, Jha said: “BCG vaccine can be helpful. There is some circumstantial evidence that these vaccines can be helpful, but it’s not very good evidence. New testing is underway and we’ll know in the next few months if these vaccines play a major role. There is some evidence that the weather makes a difference. There is less transmission of the disease in being outdoors than indoors.”
He added: “It’s a new virus. There is new testing. New studies are going on and in the next couple of months, we’ll know much more. Some nice randomised trials are being carried out. I suspect that in the next three months, we’ll know much more if these vaccines will play a major role. I’m personally sceptical that the BCG vaccine will be an important mediator. I don’t know, but we’ll know soon. But there’s certainly not enough evidence to make policy as of now.”
Jha said there is some evidence, which shows that the weather makes a difference. “There’s going to be easy transmission if 15 people are staying in one small room. But once these people are outdoors, and there’s the air that would make the situation a bit better.”
Jha claimed that the world is entering an age of pandemics.
“I’m confident that this is not the last large global pandemic you and I are going to see in the next 20 years. We got lucky that in the 2009 H1N1 swine flu didn’t cause that much harm, even though it was declared a pandemic. A virus that gets started somewhere spreads very quickly globally,” he added.
“There are also big environmental changes. All of this economic growth that you see in China and India and many other places have lifted people out of poverty. But the growth also led to deforestation and rampant encroachment on animal habitats. Most pandemics that come to humans jump from animals. This virus has existed in bats but there was a small change probably in the genome and all of a sudden it became suitable for human hosts. I think climate change is going to make many of these things worse,” he said.
“The other thing that has happened with economic growth is that people are eating a lot more meat, which means more interactions between humans and animals. Put all of it together. If you look at the last 100 years, you’ll see the increasing frequency of these kind of outbreaks and Covid-19, of course, is the worst in a hundred years. But, I’m confident that we’re going to have more global pandemics in the coming years and decades. We have to ask ourselves: how we are going to better prepare for the next one?” Jha asked.
