Ha, I was going to mention this from the last conference, but didn’t get around to it.
From the above link:
“"It appears at present that the destiny of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is to become endemic," said David Heymann, the London-based chair of the WHO's strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards.“
Let me grab/transcribe Dr. Mike’s response. He agreed with David Heymann:
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Eta:
1:02:26 -
source:
Dr. Mike Ryan: “...I think it’s important we focus on the first objective of the vaccine rollout will be to prevent severe illness, prevent deaths, protect frontline health workers and to protect the most vulnerable people in our society, and we would hope that that protection is offered to health workers and vulnerable people all around the world. So the first and primary objective is to decrease the impact that this disease is having on people’s lives, and therefore that will be a major step forward in bringing the world back to some kind of normal. The second phase is looking at how will this vaccine affect transmission, and Soumya is right, we just don’t know enough yet, about length of protection and other things to be able to absolutely predict that, but I think we should be able to get good control of the virus. A decision then to move towards elimination or eradication of this virus requires a much higher degree of efficiency and effectiveness in the vaccination program and all the other control measures. And we still don’t know based on virus evolution, based on so many other things...the likely scenario is that the virus will become, as David Heymann said previously, another endemic virus, a virus that will remain somewhat of a threat, but a very low level threat, in the context of an effective global vaccination program. It remains to see how well the vaccines will be taken up, how close we get to a coverage level that might allow us the opportunity to go for elimination or eradication, we’ve seen this with polio, we’ve seen this with measles....the existence of a vaccine even at high efficacy is no guarantee of eliminating or eradicating an infectious disease. That is a very high bar for us to get over. First and foremost we have to focus on saving lives, getting good control of this epidemic so our societies can return to normal, then we will deal with the moonshot of potentially being able to eliminate or eradicate this virus, but at this point, based on the tools we have and the knowledge we have, that’s impossible to say at this moment.”
