Cuban scientist Rolando Pajón, who worked on the creation of the Moderna anticovid vaccinepredicted a new rebound of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In an interview with the magazine Week, Rolando Pajón said that he has not gone to Cuba for more than 15 years. The scientist stayed in Canada during an official trip.
Graduated in Medicine, Pajón led a research team at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) of the Island. There he worked on a vaccine against meningococcus. He and his team were trying to carry out a trial for which a reagent that was not easy to obtain was necessary. So, Pajón contacted a scientist at the University of Calgary, in Canada, and traveled to that country.
Today he works as medical director for Latin America at Moderna Inc. and was one of the architects of the first vaccine that the world knew against Covid-19.
“The speed with which we achieved a vaccine against the coronavirus set a standard for generating solutions against other viruses. Before they asked us how we made it so quickly. And now, in other vaccine candidates, they question us why we are delaying. The Covid- 19 put on the table the need to innovate and the acceleration factor,” said Pajón.
When asked if it was possible a repetition of the pandemic, the Cuban scientist responded: “Yes, unfortunately it is going to be repeated.”
“History is a great teacher”, he explained. “If we go back to the 1918 pandemic, which caused many deaths, there were people who denied the virus and the measures to combat the disease. And in 2020, with Covid-19, the same thing happened: a global pandemic that brings many deaths and human skepticism. The climate crisis will leave us on the verge of another pandemic. There are changes in human behavior, migratory flows and hyperconnectivity that means that an infectious disease does not concentrate in a population, but rather spreads. A long time ago we had a great Zika contagion and a high incidence of microcephaly in Brazil due to this infection among pregnant women. There was monkeypox, which began in Africa and became endemic. Pandemics will be cyclical, but the difference is that we will be able to generate a vaccine candidate and have clinical studies in just days.
Regarding what science is doing to counteract this permanent threat, Pajón pointed out that For some, preventive work is being done on vaccines. “We have a candidate in phase one, in conjunction with the US National Institute of Health, against the Nipah virus, which causes a very lethal disease, with pandemic potential, and affects India. We have identified another 20 diseases with pandemic potential and we are working to advance science in the face of a disaster.
The scientist highlighted that Covid-19 has not disappeared. “People have let their guard down and if this continues there could be a new global peak in infections. In the US, between 250 and 400 people die every day for the disease. And although the risk of hospitalization and death in children is lower, it is not zero. In the pediatric population it is higher than other viruses, such as chickenpox. “We must be clear that, even for a person who has already had Covid-19, the protection provided by the course of the disease is very limited.”
If the person was vaccinated in 2021 and did not do so again, that vaccine protected them well against the virus that was circulating at that time, but the one that is circulating now is a subvariant of omicron and is making people sick who have not received their booster dose, who have not updated their immune response, Pajón warned.
Moderna’s chief medical officer also warned about latent viruses. They are known to infect humans and “stay with us for life,” he said.
“For example, cytomegalovirus, herpes, chickenpox, Epstein-Barr virus. These are viruses for which it has been difficult to develop vaccines. The symptoms of cytomegalovirus in some cases disappear, the virus remains in the body and is periodically reborn. If we are talking about a pregnant woman and she becomes infected, the probability that she will transmit that virus to the baby is very high. Infections due to this virus generate 35,000 cases a year in the United States. And a large percentage of babies who become infected are left with neurological consequences, such as vision or hearing problems and motor coordination problems. We want to reduce the occurrence of neonatal infections through vaccination in adults of reproductive age,” she said.
In America, latent viruses have a high presence, according to Pajón. “Cytomegalovirus has the highest seropositivity rate in the world, in some regions more than 80%. The cytomegalovirus vaccine is in phase three and we are working to demonstrate its effectiveness in an adult population of reproductive age, mainly women, to break the chain of infection and so that fewer children are born with sequelae. The idea is to have the vaccine ready in 2025,” said the Cuban scientist.
2023-09-12 16:26:00
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