10. The Last Lingering Questions

The Vax Files

In this final and tenth episode, we'll tackle some of the last lingering questions that we all have around the vaccines and how the future might look as we navigate these uncharted pandemic waters. Experts first discuss new interim datasets from Johnson and Johnson and Novavax, notably their results on preventing severe disease, hospitalizations and deaths, and how they might fit into the vaccine paradigm. We'll break down why some EU countries have made the surprise recent decision not to administer AstraZeneca's vaccine to people over 65. Meanwhile, Russia's Sputnik-V now has a lot more data and we'll see how this vaccine measures up on the global scale of vaccines. Experts discuss vaccine utility in the real world and the debate around infection and transmission, delaying the second dose to get first doses out quicker and mixing different vaccine brands under extenuating circumstances. Safety remains a big question as the media and social media continue to flag individual cases of severe side-effects and deaths, but we'll look at the data and statistics and how to critically think about the overall safety profile of the vaccine (and when not to panic). Finally, this episode will tackle important future questions such as the need to vaccinate children and how things might look as we attempt to get back to being a global community with travel.

Expert Guests: -- Dr Jeffery Morris is Professor of Biostatistics and Director, Biostatistics Division at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests focus on developing quantitative methods to extract knowledge from biomedical big data. -- Dr Monica Gandhi is Professor of Medicine and Associate Division Chief (Clinical Operations/Education) of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at University California San Francisco/San Francisco General Hospital. -- Dr Gayani Tillekeratne is Assistant Professor of Medicine and Assistant Research Professor of Global Health at Duke University. She was a co-investigator on the clinical trials of both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca's vaccine in the US. -- Dr Nikolai Petrovsky is Professor of Medicine, Flinders University, Adelaide and vice-president and secretary-general of the International Immunomics Society. He is the founder of vaccine biotech, Vaxine, which has a protein based candidate in early development for Covid-19. -- Dr Saul Faust is Professor of Paediatric Immunology and Infectious Diseases and Director of the Southampton NIHR Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility at the University of Southhampton. He is heavily involved in UK paedatric vaccine trials. -- Dr Mary-Louise McLaws is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of New South Wales and is also a member of the World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program Experts Advisory Panel for Infection Prevention and Control Preparedness, Readiness and Response to COVID-19.