Modern CEO Stephane Bancel
Steven Ferdman | Getty Images
The CEO of Moderna, maker of vaccines Covid-19, warned on Wednesday that the coronavirus that paralyzed world economies and generated crowded hospitals, will exist “forever”.
Public health officials and infectious disease experts said there is a high likelihood that Covid-19 will become an endemic disease, meaning it will be present in communities all the time, although probably at lower levels than now.
Moderna’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, seemed to agree on Wednesday that Covid-19 will become endemic, saying “SARS-CoV-2 will not disappear”.
“We are going to live with this virus, we think, forever,” he said during a panel discussion at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference.
Health officials will have to continually watch for new variants of the virus so that scientists can produce vaccines to fight them, he said. Researchers in Ohio said on Wednesday that they had discovered two new variants likely to originate in the U.S. and that one quickly became the dominant strain in Columbus, Ohio, over a three-week period in late December and early January.
Pfizer researchers said their vaccine developed with BioNTech appears to be effective against a key mutation in the UK strain, as well as a variant found in South Africa.
Moderna’s vaccine has been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for use in Americans aged 18 and over. Additional studies have yet to be completed in children, whose immune systems may respond to vaccines differently than adults.
US officials are rushing to distribute doses of both vaccines, but it will probably be months before the United States can vaccinate enough people to gain collective immunity, meaning that the virus will not have enough new hosts to spread. Still, Bancel said on Wednesday that he expects the United States to be one of the first major countries to obtain “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.