A vaccine for the coronavirus will not be widely available for the public until 2021 at the earliest, the Public Health Agency of Canada said yesterday.
Dr. Howard Njoo, the deputy chief chief public health officer, said that the vaccine will "take time," but that "we can't remain in lockdown forever."
“This phase of the pandemic remains an uncertain and stressful time as we carefully weigh the risks and benefits in order to make what used to be easy, everyday decisions,” said Njoo. “It’s now even more important to develop a vaccine and treatments for COVID-19.”
“There are lots of steps ahead of us before we might anticipate there might be a safe vaccine available for use in the general population,” he said. “Most scientists who are being very optimistic might think if there were to be a vaccine, it wouldn’t be before 2021.”
It's a worrying timeline, though not one that was fully unexpected. In April, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that normal life would not return for "a long time."
"What is a normal life will take a long time to return, and even at this point, two or three years from now, even once a vaccine against COVID-19 is available, we will have changed our behaviour. We will have taken measures as a society that will be different from what we used to do," Trudeau told reporters in French.
On June 26, the agency told the Senate social affairs committee that a second wave was on the horizon and would reach shores sometime after Labour Day, though it was still undetermined whether or not shutdown orders would be reinstated. “We hope it won’t come earlier, but I think we just have to prepare for what we call the reasonable worst-case scenario,” said Dr. Theresa Tam. “We don’t have a vaccine... The population is unlikely to have a high level of immunity. The risk of resurgence is very real.”
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