Why a Vaccine Won't Create Instant Immunity

its way into a younger demographic around the world. Infections among millennials and Generation Z are driving new waves of cases, and even where restrictions have been reimposed, they are aren't abating easily. A major challenge psychological fatigue with social distancing, especially as the pandemic drags into its eighth month. Young adults are both less fearful of the coronavirus and face

greater economic and social costs when they stay home. The trend may be a sign that social distancing is untenable over a long period, even though doing so flatten the virus curve in many places. Earlier this year, Google will keep its employees home until at least next July. According to a report, by Dow Jones. That makes the tech giant the first major US corporation to formalize such an extended timetable in the face of the pandemic. Finally, some

insight into a potential vaccine. Once we've developed one, we may need to get a shot every year, just like the flu shot. Kate Bingham, head of the UK's COVID Vaccine Task Force, told Bloomberg TV that an initial dose will probably reduce the severity of symptoms and that continued treatment will be needed to maintain immunity. Bingham said people who have had COVID don't show long lasting immunity, and her task force is seeing a decline in antibodies that

get generated after infection. A sterilizing vaccine that would prevent infection completely is still being pursued. Bingham also said it's unlikely any vaccine would be ready before the end of this year. Vaccine challenges are also the subject of today's main story. An effective vaccine is seen as the world's greatest hope for achieving some kind of return to normal, and the timeline for developing one has been sped up dramatically. But as hard as it's going to be to make

a vaccine quickly. Once we do, we'll have a new problem getting it to billions of people. The industries that move goods around the world on ships, planes, and trucks acknowledge they aren't ready to handle the epic challenges involved in shipping an eventual vaccine to the world. I talked to reporter Brendan Murray who explains how difficult it will be for the global supply chain to distribute and administer the drug. So what are some of the issues with

getting vaccines into the hands of billions of people? So the pharmaceutical companies are are scaling up in a massive way to try to deliver this UH and out to the coronavirus to billions and billions of people potentially. At the same time, the global economy is scaling down in a big way. That means ocean shipping companies, air freight companies are scaling back capacity to deal with the slower

demand that the global economy is throwing off. So you have these conflicting forces creating a lot of challenges to to deliver UH. You know what could be you know, three or four or five billion vaccines to two people around the world. Now you have you know, a couple of other complications, one of the main ones being this vaccine is likely going to need to be, if not frozen, very close to freezing, and you maintained all throughout the

transportation process. So uh, you know, there's really are real questions about whether there's capacity there to do that in any massive way that's going to be required. Now, you know, we've seen issues with supply chains before during this crisis. Obviously earlier on and I mean even continuing to now, there have been issues about getting um, personal protective equipment or ppe to healthcare workers, to everyone around the world. Now, why is the question of the vaccine and distribution a

little bit different from that issue that we saw earlier? Right? I think most people would say, uh, if you're looking at it objectively, that supply chains, you know, we're bent and stretched, but they never really broke. Now. You you did see shortages of things like toilet paper or even you know, medical equipment, UM, but the systems that are designed to deliver products, you know, international supply chains essentially

caught up pretty quickly and resolve that situation. With the vaccine, you have, as I said, you know, billions of people. They are going to need this, uh. And one of the experts that I listened to last week said that, you know, it takes one Boeing Triple seven to carry a million doses, so a thousand triple sevens to carry a billion. So if a billion people are going to get two doses of this, that's two thousand triple seven cargo planes full of them. And it's it's the vaccine

isn't going to come all at once. It's going to come millions of doses at a time, and there's just no telling when exactly that's going to happen. And that creates problems for if you if you're a shipping company, an ocean freighter company, or or an air cargo company, you need to know, uh, you know when that's coming to be able to gauge the uh, the the amount of capacity you're going to devote to it to the

demand side. And again, you know that the world economy is not going to stop and wait for vaccines to be delivered. You know they're going to have to do this on top of all the other pushing and pulling that you know, supply and demand are doing at the same time. And I was wondering if You might dig into that a little bit more. As you mentioned this, this demand for international resources supplies. Obviously, if and when there's a vaccine, that means that there will be distribution

and demand needed globally. But we're also seeing this simultaneously at a point where a lot of world economies are contracting or even kind of slowing down their supply chains. I mean, what is the push pull there of how do we distribute something globally when the global supply chains are no longer as strong as they were even say a year ago. Yeah, exactly. It's a good point, and particularly at a time when you know this is going

to take global coordination. The the issue that that I've heard in the past week or so from the experts is that there is no coordinated strategy right now. You have to start thinking about this stuff now. If it's going to happen in six months. You can't just sort of fire up a bunch of cargo planes and and and make this happen. So it's a difficult time to do so. Supply chains are stretched, countries are are saying

or we don't want production coming from overseas anymore. They're getting very protectionists with the production of particularly drugs and medical gear. You know, in an environment where uh, you know, countries are already a skeptical of working with others uh and dealing dealing with you know, cross border movement of of things, particularly as as as vital as as a vaccine.

You know, you could see all sorts of protectionism breakout and kind of the you know, the strong survive or the the wealthier country survive at the at the expense of of of other countries. There was an expert I heard this week who said, how are these vaccines going to get to you know, a rural area in Mozambique or upen into mountains in Peru if it needs to be refrigerated. I mean, the short answer is it's going to take a long time if it ever gets to

places like that. On top of the issue of global economies, I mean, we're also looking at a crisis point in the airline industry itself, obviously in the wake of the pandemic um What are some of the unique challenges that the airline industry in particular is facing in terms of logistics distributing this vaccine. So the airline industry has both curtailed the supply of the capacity of of air cargo, because when passengers aren't flying, the bottom half of that

plane is not filled with cargo. So they have both you know, when they grounded planes that left, uh that the air air cargo capacity and a real in a real crunch. Now, the flip side of that is you can turn a passenger plane into into one that haul's cargo. It it takes time and money, but they but they, but they've been able to do that. Emirates I believe has seventy Triple seven's former passenger planes that are now

running cargo around the world. So that's that's the other reason why you need to plan ahead because the airline industry is not expecting this downturn to be you know, to last for you know, a couple or several more months. They're looking at this over the next two to three years and try and gauge how much air carbo capacity there is is just basically impossible right now. And let's

finally talk timelines. There are several candidates right now in trials um there are numerous attempts to make a successful vaccine all over the world, and a lot of people are saying that we actually have quite a bit of time before we can really expect to see a successful vaccine. Will this amount of time in some way do you think give us the time we need to prepare for

this distribution on a global scale. Well, that's one of the reasons why I think people in the in the transportation shipping logistics industry are kind of raising the alarm right now because the most optimistic scenario is the first doses are available by the end of the year. Most realists would say it's probably more like, you know, the first quarter or middle of next year before are tens of millions of these are going to be available. So that's that's a wide uh, you know, timetable to to

plan how much how much airlift capacity you're gonna need. So, yeah, I think it's going to be a real there's a real question mark. Um. And as soon as that timetable is clearer than than the transportation folks can, can you get a plan together to do it? You know that the fallback is if the private industry can't do this, you know, then you you could conceivably see the governments in various countries, maybe even the military takeover that that role.

That was Brendan Murray in London, and that's it for our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more steners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Tophor foreheads Jordan Gaspore, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was

reported by Brendan Murray. Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.