QATAR health authorities are expecting that a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine will be available in the country by the end of this year or early next year. The Ministry of Public Health has signed deals with Moderna as well as Pfizer-BioNTech, the two vaccine developers that have reported that their respective candidate vaccines are 95% effective after largescale phase 3 trials. MoPH has welcomed the progress reported by both the firms and is awaiting final regulatory and safety approvals before the vaccine can be rolled out for global use. Qatar’s approach to procure the vaccines have proved effective. Apart from these two firms, the MOPH has been in discussions with multiple international pharmaceutical companies since the early days of the pandemic to ensure Qatar’s population has early access to COVID-19 vaccines as soon as they demonstrate safety and efficacy and are approved for use. Never before have so much effort and resources been put into the development of a vaccine. This investment is now starting to pay off and we have seen very promising early results from two different vaccines. “We eagerly await further results of the trials and regulatory approval of the vaccines and there is good reason to be optimistic that the COVID-19 vaccines on the horizon can enable life to return to normal sooner rather than later,” said Dr. Abdullatif Al Khal, Chair of the National Health Strategic Group on COVID-19 and Head of Infectious Diseases at Hamad Medical Corporation. Moderna is expected to manufacture between 500 million to one billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine next year. Based on the agreement the Ministry of Public Health has with Moderna, the supply of vaccine will be during the first half of 2021. Since the first cases of the novel coronavirus infection were identified in China in December 2019, around 1,348,720 people have died from the pandemic, out of the more than 56.24 million cases detected to date globally. And even as a safe, effective vaccine is likely to be rolled out soon, health experts say a combination of both the vaccination and the precautionary measures will be needed to end the pandemic. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, who addressed the Qatar Foundation’s World Innovation Summit for Health 2020 on Wednesday, thinks preventive measures will need to continue along with vaccination until an overall protection umbrella is all over the world, which he said might take a year or two.
