Modern CEO Stephane Bancel
Steven Ferdman | Getty Images
The CEO of vaccine manufacturer Covid-19 Moderna warned on Wednesday that the coronavirus that has brought the world economies to a standstill and overwhelmed hospitals will be around “forever”.
Public health officials and infectious disease experts said Covid-19 is highly likely to become endemic, meaning it will become present in communities at any time, though probably at lower levels than it is now.
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel appeared on Wednesday to agree that Covid-19 would become endemic, saying “SARS-CoV-2 will not go away”.
“We will live with this virus, we believe, forever,” he said during a discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare conference.
Health officials will have to constantly look for new variants of the virus so that scientists can produce vaccines to fight them, he said. Researchers in Ohio said Wednesday that they have discovered two new variants, probably from the United States, and that one of them quickly became the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-week period in late December and early January.
Pfizer researchers said its vaccine developed with BioNTech appears to be effective against a key mutation in the British strain, as well as a variant found in South Africa.
The Modern Vaccine has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use by Americans 18 years of age and older. Further studies have yet to be completed in children, whose immune systems may respond differently to vaccines than in adults.
US officials are struggling to distribute doses of both vaccines, but it will probably take several months for the US to vaccinate enough people to get the herd immunity, meaning the virus will not have enough new hosts to spread. However, Bancel said on Wednesday that it expects the US to be one of the first large countries to get “sufficient protection” against the virus.
There are already four endemic coronaviruses worldwide, but they are not as contagious or deadly as Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization.