There, he really said it, at the press conference Tuesday evening. The development of vaccines is progressing so well that, according to health minister Hugo de Jonge, ‘we hope to receive the first vaccines in the first months of 2021’. No: already at the end of this year, hospital manager and internist Marcel Levi casually trumped over in talk show Jinek.
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About 29 percent of the Dutch population currently says no to a rapidly developed corona vaccine. (image anp / Koen van Weel)
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These are statements that vaccine experts are reluctant to undergo. ‘I think early next year is very optimistic,’ says Hanneke Schuitemaker, virologist and head of vaccine development at the Leiden pharmaceutical company Janssen. As long as this doesn’t become a political prestige game, they said in science magazine Science also several American vaccinologists. For example, President Donald Trump has repeatedly boasted that the vaccine will be ready at the end of next month, in time for election day. That gives pressure, if the boss says so.
Expectations are not completely unreasonable. About ten vaccines are currently in the third and final research phase before they are ‘ready’: the phase in which the vaccines are tested on tens of thousands of people, to see if the vaccine b ..
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