Novartis CEO says it will take more than vaccines to fight COVID
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Vaccines alone will not be enough to fight Covid-19, Novartis AG Chief Executive Officer Vas Narasimhan said. Treatments will also play a crucial role.
Significant supplies of highly effective vaccines probably won’t be available until the end of next year, according to Narasimhan, who headed development for Novartis’s former vaccines unit before it was sold to GlaxoSmithKline Plc five years ago.
Even once such a vaccine is on the market, he said, it probably won’t protect everyone — as is the case with seasonal flu.
“At minimum, therapeutics are a bridge to those high-volume, high-efficacy vaccines,” Narasimhan said in an interview. “Likely even beyond the point of vaccines being broadly deployed, we will need therapeutics for those patients who still become ill from the virus.”
The Swiss pharmaceutical company and 15 other drugmakers issued a joint pledge with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on Wednesday promising, among other things, to support fair allocation of vaccines and therapies globally. Suppliers will decide on their own whether to use donations, not-for-profit supply or tiered pricing.
They also called for “removing unwarranted political considerations” from the process to approve drugs, vaccines and tests.
