He told reporters that it may be 18 months before the first vaccine is available, “so we have to do everything today, using available weapons.” He called on Member States to be “as aggressive as possible” and view the virus as “public enemy number one”, in terms of public health.
Following the West African Ebola outbreak, the UN health agency devised a strategy for developing drugs and vaccines before future epidemics, and for accelerating research and development activities during outbreaks.
In line with this protocol, an “R&D Blueprint” team at WHO began work in early January this year, to coordinate and facilitate information-sharing on research elements of the response, Tedros explained.
Echoing the WHO Director-General’s comments, Ms. Chaib told a news conference that much was still unknown about the virus, which remains principally a threat in China.
“We are still in the very early stage of understanding this virus,” she said. “How it is transmitted, the source of the virus, the incubation period, the clinical features, the severity of it…99 per cent of cases are in China; this remains very much an emergency for that country, but it’s also a high risk for the region, Asia, and for the world.”
Discussing the work of the coronavirus forum at the WHO, Ms. Chaib reiterated the hope that scientists would share information across many cross-cutting areas.
“They are not only talking about vaccines or therapeutics or diagnostic tests, they will also talk about the human-animal interface of this virus”, she said. “They will also talk about the clinical features of the patients they have seen, they will share information about all of this.”
In response to a question that the incubation period of the coronavirus might turn out to be longer than two weeks - the currently accepted timeline - the WHO spokesperson underscored that “we have a lot of unknowns with this virus. We are saying it’s from one to 14 days. But we are welcoming all sorts of studies and scientific papers that provides more and more knowledge to the scientific community to better understand this outbreak and the virus itself.”
Photo source: picture from an open source