Normalcy Will Return By Next Year Winter, Says Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Creator, Prof Ugur Sahin

Relief from the COVID era can only be expected by next year's winter, as any vaccine will take time to show its effectiveness and will not immediately reduce the number of infections, as per the co-developer of Pfizer's vaccine, media reports said.

A new COVID vaccine's impact will be seen significantly over the summer and life should be back to normal by next winter, said Prof Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech, whose vaccine candidate has proved to prevent over 90 per cent people from getting COVID-19, as per preliminary reports. The Pfizer-BioNTech is one of the 11 vaccines in their final test stages.

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Siemens (Prof. Dr. Ugur Sahin, CEO, BioNTech AG)

This winter would still be hard, he said in an interview on the BBC's Andrew Marr Show.

Sahin said he was confident the vaccine would reduce transmission between people as well as stop symptoms developing in someone who has had the vaccine, though not as high as the test results but still "maybe 50 per cent."

Prof Sahin said if everything continued to go well, the vaccine would begin to be delivered at the "end of this year, beginning of next year."

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ABC

The goal is to deliver more than 300 million doses worldwide by next April, he said on the BBC show, which "could allow us to only start to make an impact;" the bigger impact will be seen later.

"Summer will help us because the infection rate will go down in the summer and what is absolutely essential is that we get a high vaccination rate until or before autumn/winter next year," he stressed.

When asked if the vaccine was as effective in older people as it is in younger people, he said he expected to have a better idea in the next three weeks.

He said it was not yet known how long immunity would last after the vaccine's second shot is administered.

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BioSpectrum Asia

Sahin also said the "key side effects" of the vaccine seen so far were a mild to moderate pain in the injection site for a few days, while some participants had a mild to moderate fever over a similar period.

Disclaimer: This story is based on Prof Sahin's interview, and it does not endorse, encourage or promote any one vaccine over the other, nor does it claim for any of them to be a solution for COVID-19. No one but a medical professional should be consulted before taking any medication whatsoever.