Every nursing home in Ireland could have access to a coronavirus vaccine by Christmas or early in the New Year, according to Trinity Professor Luke O’Neill.

Professor O’Neill was speaking after pharmaceutical giant said its vaccine candidate is more than 90% effective.

The first interim results from the trial also found “no serious safety concerns” with the vaccine.

The EU has already bought 200 million doses of the vaccine with the option to buy another 100 million.

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, Professor O’Neill said the next key moment for Pfizer will be the release of their full safety analysis in about two weeks’ time.

“When we see that data properly laid out in a proper scientific report – that will take another three of four weeks – then we will know they have made it really,” he said.

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He said healthcare workers and nursing home residents will be first in line for a vaccine.

“It goes to the healthcare workers first because they are on the frontline obviously,” he said. “They are the ones at risk of getting infected.

“Then secondly the vulnerable – that means older people.

“You could see a situation where every nursing home now will have the vaccine available to it, maybe just before Christmas.

“That seems a bit ambitious but certainly early next year we will see the older population being vaccinated and the vulnerable groups, the ones who have got other diseases.

“Effectively what you are doing is you are giving a medical shield to the vulnerable. That is why this is so good in sense.”

Vaccines

He said the Pfizer results bode “very well” for the other vaccines in development and agreed that there is a chance the world could be getting back to normal by spring.

“We are probably going to get a situation where, before Christmas, two more announcements will be made,” he said. “The AstraZenica vaccine and also the Moderna vaccine

“With the fact that the Pfizer one works so well, there is a reasonable chance these next two will work similarly.

“So, by Christmas there could be three highly efficacious vaccines – with all the usual caveats.

“That means supply won’t be an issue because they can all roll out billions of doses as we move into 2021 and secondly, Pfizer had already mobilised an army to prepare 1.4 billion doses of this vaccine so they are ramping up production massively.

“The CEO is also on record as saying, there is no point in making a vaccine unless you can roll it out quickly. So, they are very well aware of the need to get it to people as quickly as possible.

“So, it is not unreasonable to assume, by the middle of next year, you would have to say probably, we will have widespread rollout.”

Professor Luke O'Neill pictured next to TBSI's nuclear magnetic resonance instrument which has the strongest magnetic field in Ireland, 27-06-2014. Image: Mark Stedman/RollingNews

He cautioned that, for now, all Pfizer has published is a press release and said scientists are now eagerly awaiting the hard data.

“But they wouldn’t have announced it unless there was something remarkable here because there would be big egg on the face of the CEO, you can imagine, if it unravels in the next couple of weeks,” he said.

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