Celebrity author wants vaccine data from India, China, Russia co-related for efficacy.
Celebrated Indian-American cancer physician, researcher and author Siddhartha Mukherjee says deploying a coronavirus vaccine just in the US without even talking about rest of the world was ‘madness’.
A professor of medicine at Columbia University founder of a vaccine-delivery platform called Othena, Mukherjee has suggested that one should get the vaccine whenever one becomes eligible for it.
However, in a discussion with four other experts, author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer,” saw “value in more broadly distributing at least a little vaccine in the earlier phases.”
This way “we can understand its success and failure rates in the real world, across various populations,” he said during the discussion hosted by the New York Times magazine.
“In the trials that have been done so far, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines were each tested on 30,000 to 40,000 people. Now we are in a phase of massive expansion,” Mukherjee said.
“We need a broader range of people to figure out, Is this really working? Is it really preventing infections across all the groups that need to be protected? Six months from now, we don’t want to still be asking that question,” he said.
Mukherjee said researchers would also “like to know how the vaccine affects women who are pregnant and people who are partially immuno-compromised, and young kids.”
“And we’d like to know about drug-vaccine interactions — if a particular drug you’re taking changes the effectiveness of the vaccine,” he said noting billions of people would have be vaccinated.
“Deploying a vaccine just in the United States, not even talking about the world, to more than 300 million people without the digital infrastructure, which we lack currently, it sounds to me like madness,” Mukherjee said.
“Companies in India are making hundreds of millions of doses of Covid vaccines. China and Russia have vaccines, too,” he noted. “But we don’t know whether any of these vaccines have been tested with the same rigor as the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.”
To Mukherjee, “this is the most unfortunate thing about vaccine testing that’s happened by far. The only data that we have about the Chinese vaccine comes from the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, and we don’t know the efficacy of it.”
“They say it’s 86 percent; we don’t know real numbers. The Russian vaccine also has very little information released. Then there’s the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has run into data problems,” he noted.
Mukherjee noted India as a country got into trouble, politically and internationally, from breaking patents on drugs for antiretroviral therapies for HIV.
“The world regime right now is not very sympathetic to breaking vaccine patents. And I just don’t see that happening in the short run.”
Mukherjee said it was “so important for the vaccine data to be cleaned up and presented properly so that we can understand what the trade-offs are.”
“Because even if we break the patents, I just don’t see Pfizer, with a vaccine that must be kept at –70 degrees, deploying it to 1.3 billion people in India. I just don’t see it,” he said.
“When one of the easily deployable vaccines is available, if every one of America’s billionaires put a fraction of their wealth into deploying it to the Global South, worldwide vaccination would become an achievable goal,” Mukherjee said.
Meanwhile, seeking to assure those who have apprehensions about the “long term effects” of the vaccines, Mukherjee tweeted last week he will get a shot of the coronavirus vaccine as soon as he would be eligible to get a dose.
“I will put my own skin in the game,” he said and would also log every side effect from the coronavirus vaccine on his website ‘Othena.com’
“I’m totally willing to share every nanosecond of my experience, pre and post,” Mukherjee wrote adding, “I think vaccines are the only way forward.”
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