When a COVID-19 vaccine is ready, will we all be ready for it?

Excerpt

The current response to the COVID-19 pandemic involves aggressive implementation of containment, suppression, and mitigation strategies. Such an approach encompasses the enforcement of a variety and combination of public health measures including hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette, disinfection, case identification, isolation of sick people, tracing and quarantine of contacts, and unprecedented mass community restrictions. Besides considerable investments in interventions to contain transmission, and in diagnostics and therapeutics research, whose way forward is framed within the WHO coordinated global research roadmap (WHO 2020), a vaccine represents the most promising strategy for combatting the COVID-19 pandemic through primary prevention. In addition to bio-tech companies and governments pushing, and in some cases suggesting, that a vaccine may be available as early as Fall 2020, it is widely believed that an effective and available vaccine will be ready for licensure no sooner than 12–18 months from now (Kormann 2020). Five phase I clinical trials are ongoing in the USA and/or China and other trials are expected to be initiated soon in Germany and the UK (Le et al. 2020). …