Article content continued
Murthy said the Canada is also part of a world-wide conglomerate of countries that are funding trials for many more vaccines in the hope one will turn out.
“If one gets regulatory approval, you get a certain amount,” he said. “That levels the playing field so that everybody in the world gets at least a proportion of their population vaccinated in the beginning.”
Most of clinical trials are being conducted in countries like the U.S, Brazil, U.K. and India where the disease is widespread with high numbers of sick people.
Murthy said the World Health Organization has a vaccine success threshold of 50 per cent, meaning a vaccine would prevent disease in at least 50 per cent of people inoculated in a safe way.
Flu vaccines offer between 25 to 75 per cent effectiveness depending on the year.
“I am confident there will be a vaccine that is effective, whether it’s long-lasting immunity, though, is unclear,” Murthy said.
He cautioned that his spring prediction was for a vaccine that has been approved by Health Canada and is available in great volume.
“Then it’s a matter of how that gets distributed to each province and to which target population first,” he said.
