WHO expresses cautious optimism on COVID-19 vaccine development progress

The World Health Organization (WHO) remains cautiously optimistic on the development of COVID-19 vaccines despite the encouraging news about recent test results, said Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a press briefing on Monday.

Moderna, an American biotechnology company, announced on Monday that its coronavirus vaccine is 94.5 percent effective against the virus. The announcement came a week after Pfizer and BioNTech reported that their vaccine candidate was 90 percent effective.

"This is not the time for complacency. While we continue to receive encouraging news about COVID-19 vaccines and remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for new tools to start to arrive in the coming months. Right now, we are extremely concerned by the surging cases we’re seeing in some countries. Particularly in Europe and the Americas, health workers and health systems are being pushed to the breaking point," said Tedros.

Soumya Swaminathan, a WHO chief scientist, said it is encouraging to see that two COVID-19 vaccines with mRNA technology seem to achieve high efficacy to the virus.

While time is needed for a complete data analysis to find out the final efficacy and safety of the vaccines, it is also necessary to track the side effects of the test users.

"There are many, many questions still remaining about the duration of protection, the impact on severe disease, the impact on different sub-populations, especially the elderly, as well as the adverse events beyond a certain period of time. So, we also hope that the clinical trials will continue to collect data because that's really going to be important for us to know about in the long-term," said Soumya.

Soumya also said the WHO will cooperate with all developers and companies of COVID-19 vaccines on the "COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX)" plan to ensure that it has the widest range of vaccine options.

The coronavirus vaccine can only achieve a very limited supply by the first half of 2021, as the WHO predicted.

The WHO's goal is to protect high-risk groups, including health workers, in all countries from the coronavirus, said Soumya.