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Mr President, it would be really important that you find something that can be used to convince vaccine skeptics,” says vaccine researcher Peter Palese to Alexander Van der Bellen when he visits him in his laboratory in New York. “I will then receive the Nobel Prize ?” asks Van der Bellen and looks at Palese mischievously.
The atmosphere is relaxed and relaxed, the visit to Palese and Florian Krammer at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York is to Van der Bellen’s taste. Palese, who once studied at the Biochemistry Institute of the Medical University of Vienna, and Krammer, whose alma mater is Boku Vienna, guide the Federal President and his wife Doris Schmidauer through the laboratories. The winding corridors are crammed with crates and boxes, there are coffee mugs and empty pizza boxes on a small table, and young scientists and laboratory workers hurry through the corridors, busy and determined.
Florian Krammer shows the President a glass plate with colored virus preparations. When Van der Bellen has some difficulties putting on the doctor’s green latex gloves to touch the preparation plates with his fingers, Krammer says jokingly: “It’s good that you’re the Federal President and not a virologist” – and thus brings the whole delegation, including Van der Bellen , to smile.
But in the conversation it quickly becomes serious. Because Krammer’s colleague Palese has decided to get a message out to the people during this visit: “Vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate,” he says, and Krammer adds that the pandemic can only be ended quickly and with as few fatalities as possible with vaccinations .
The Linz-born 77-year-old vaccine researcher Palese, who has been working at Mount Sinai since 1971, explains that practically everyone who is not vaccinated could face the fate of an infection – along with the well-known risks of a serious course of the disease. The number of those who “won’t get it” without vaccination will be negligible, while those who are immunized through vaccination will have little fear of ending up in intensive care because of Covid-19. “I’ve been vaccinated myself. That means I’ll die of something other than Covid-19,” says Palese with the kind of humor one encounters in hospitals and biological research institutions.
The two researchers from Austria have no understanding for people who still take the corona virus lightly: Back in spring 2020, their hospital – like every hospital in New York City – was completely overcrowded with corona patients. A field hospital was set up in Central Park, right across from the hospital, the entrance hall was full of patients, and refrigerated trucks stood in front of the hospital as makeshift morgues – around 80 patients died every night during this time. “It was spooky,” reports Krammer. Vaccination skeptics must be warned, because: “The pandemic today is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” says Palese.
Research for poorer countries
There is a reason why Palese trusts so much in the effect of the vaccines: he is currently working with a group of researchers, which also includes Krammer, on the development of a Covid 19 vaccine for countries in which it is due to tight budgets little access to vaccines. A price of around 30 cents per vaccine dose is targeted for the serum, and the clinical tests required for approval have been underway for some time.
Palese reports that they received funding primarily from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, the development of such an inexpensive vaccine is not a priority for the pharmaceutical industry, since the profit margins for such a preparation are too low. But: Countries like Vietnam, Thailand or Mexico are very interested in such a vaccine and are also willing to set up production facilities. After all, one had to make the painful experience that it is difficult to get vaccines in an emergency situation if one does not have one’s own production facilities.
When asked by the “Wiener Zeitung” whether the release of patents could lead to vaccines being produced faster and in larger quantities, Krammer was skeptical. “It’s not just about the patents, but also about the technology transfer and the infrastructure to be able to produce the vaccine,” he says. Of course, in a pandemic, the priority should be to save human lives.
Krammer does not dare to predict how the pandemic will continue. However, he expects the wave of the Delta variant to slow down globally for the time being. In the northern hemisphere, however, it is to be expected that the virus strains will increase again in the winter season. “The virus will not go away, it can be expected that it will always flare up in the winter season. But with increasing vaccination rates, this will normalize, then you just have a cold – but nothing more.”
While the Federal President was being briefed on the state of research on vaccines in Mount Sinai, Federal Chancellor Sebastian Kurz took part in a video summit on the corona pandemic initiated by US President Joe Biden on the fringes of the UN general debate. He also advocated vaccination as the “only way to defeat the virus” in his connection. “We can only speak of victory when the whole world has received the necessary vaccines.”
Kurz promises help
Kurz promised Austria’s “active contribution” to the World Health Organization’s Covax vaccination initiative – “both as an EU member and on a bilateral level”: “We have donated more than two million doses bilaterally to countries in need. We have also done pioneering work in supplying the Western Balkan countries through the EU vaccine sharing mechanism.”
Of course, there is still a lot to be done in Austria itself: Only 63.47 percent of the population has been vaccinated, in other Western European countries such as Portugal (83.3 percent) or Denmark (74.8 percent) the number is significantly higher. Austria will “do everything we can to increase vaccination rates in our own country and share vaccinations with other regions,” Kurz said.
And the Chancellor promised that Austria was ready to take in severe Covid cases for treatment in Austrian hospitals should capacities in neighboring countries be exceeded. In addition, Kurz promised to “donate oxygen and related medicines whenever and wherever they are needed” if lives could be saved.
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