No country should count on a Covid-19 vaccine – former Harvard Medical prof William Haseltine

As South Africa moves to level three of the lockdown, President Cyril Ramaphosa told the nation that the early intervention in the Covid-19 epidemic did help to contain it, but until there is a vaccine available, the virus will continue to spread in the population. Biznews spoke to former Harvard Medical Professor William Haseltine, who is known for his pioneering work on HIV/Aids and cancer, about the steps that South Africa could take to deal with the pandemic. His message was that 'no country should count on a vaccine'; and there are other steps that South Africa could take against the virus. He also said there was more hope in treatments and practices that worked in other parts of the world. Prof Haseltine who has founded a dozen biotechnology companies and is the chair and president of ACCESS Health International also shared an equation he came up with how we can determine our risk of infection during the Covid-19 pandemic. – Linda van Tilburg

We don't know if you will ever have a vaccine. And if we do have a vaccine, we don't know how effective it will be. There are good reasons to suspect – that it is effective at all and won't be completely protective – it may not stop the epidemic. It certainly will be difficult to vaccinate older people who need it most because older people are very difficult to vaccinate for any problems – whether it be flu or anything else you lose your memory for new antigens, new substances, that come into your body. It's one of the common features of ageing, anybody over 60 has a diminished immune response and the older you get the worse it is. Sometimes it takes 15 years or more to develop a vaccine that works for older people like the pneumococcal vaccine works reasonably well in older people. But it took 15 years to get it that way. It's a very tough call.

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