Mutahi Kagwe doubts Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine

Health CS Mutahi Kagwe [Elvis Ogina, Standard]

Health CS Mutahi Kagwe on Wednesday expressed his reservations over the experimental Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE saying he is yet to understand how it works.

While giving a status report on the fight against the pandemic to the Senate, Kagwe said he cannot fathom how one will be injected with a ‘disease’ to keep the virus at bay.

In a video clip, he tells the Senate Health Committee: “Yes we are hearing there is a vaccine…Pfizer say there is a vaccine but personally to tell you the truth, I have many doubts about it because they were talking about a disease [sic] that stops people from getting the virus.

“Now, I would like to know how they knew in the first place that I was going to get the virus…we are talking about treatment when I have a virus…but when you tell me that I stopped you from getting the virus…how would you know I was going to get the virus in the first place?

“So for me I have reservations about it,” he said.

Pfizer on Monday said its experimental vaccine was more than 90 per cent effective in preventing Covid-19 based on initial data from a large study.

Pfizer and German partner BioNTech SE are the first drugmakers to show successful data from a large-scale clinical trial of a coronavirus vaccine. The companies said they have so far found no serious safety concerns and expect to seek US emergency use authorisation later this month.

If authorised, the number of vaccine doses will initially be limited. Many questions also remain including how long the vaccine will provide protection. However, the news provides hope that other vaccines in development against the novel coronavirus may also prove effective.

“Today is a great day for science and humanity,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement. “We are reaching this critical milestone in our vaccine development program at a time when the world needs it most with infection rates setting new records, hospitals nearing over-capacity and economies struggling to reopen.”

Pfizer expects to seek broad US emergency use authorisation of the vaccine for people aged 16 to 85. To do so, it will need to have collected two months of safety data on around half of the study’s roughly 44,000 participants, expected in late November.

But the vaccine’s complex and super-cold storage requirements are an obstacle for even the most sophisticated hospitals in the United States and may impact when and where it is available in rural areas or poor countries where resources are tight.

The main issue is that the vaccine, which is based on a novel technology that uses synthetic mRNA to activate the immune system against the virus, needs to be kept at minus 70 degrees Celsius (-94 F) or below.

“The cold chain is going to be one of the most challenging aspects of delivery of this vaccination,” said Amesh Adalja, senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

“This will be a challenge in all settings because hospitals even in big cities do not have storage facilities for a vaccine at that ultra-low temperature.”