Inventor Of Pfizer Vaccine Says Virus Will Cause More Outbreaks ‘For The Next 10 Years’

NEW YORK (VINnews) — Ugur Sahin, the Turkish-German inventor of the world’s first approved vaccine for coronavirus, says that the virus could still be causing outbreaks in 10 years time.

Sahin’s BioNTech company partnered with Pfizer to produce the vaccine which has already been approved in many countries. 500,000 doses have already been administered in the UK, over a million in the US and more than 150,000 doses were issued in Israel over the past week.

Yet Sahin said in a Tuesday press conference that the virus could survive for several more years.

“The virus will stay with us for the next 10 years,” he said, adding that, “We need to get used to the fact that there’ll be more outbreaks.”

Asked when he believed the world might be able to return to normal, Sahin responded: “We need a new definition of ‘normal’.”

Sahin continued that a “new normal” would not mean countries having to go into lockdown and that this could be possible “by the end of the summer”.

“This winter, we will not have an impact on the infection numbers,” he said, “But we must have an impact so that next winter can be the new normal.”

Sahin also urged caution on whether 60-70% of the world’s population being vaccinated would be enough to prevent further outbreaks.

“If the virus becomes more efficient…we might need a higher uptake of the vaccine for life to return to normal.”

Both BioNTech and its main rival, Moderna, are testing their respective vaccines to see whether they are effective against the mutation of the virus found in Britain. Sahin says he will know in a few weeks whether his vaccine can curb the mutation but insists that it is “highly likely” the vaccine’s immune response can deal with the variant.

“The vaccine contains more than 1,270 amino acids, and only nine of them are changed (in the mutant virus),” Sahin says. “That means that 99% of the protein is still the same.”

The UK’s chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance concurred with Sahin’s assertion, stating on Saturday that vaccines appeared to be adequate in generating an immune response to the variant of the coronavirus.