Adolfo García Sastre: «Normality will be achieved if almost everyone gets vaccinated»

'What still lies ahead', as the title of your video conference this afternoon says?

The most important thing is to vaccinate until enough immunity is acquired to stop the number of hospitalizations.

Will vaccines end the pandemic?

They will end the pandemic, but the virus will continue to circulate and will become – I imagine, that remains to be seen – seasonal, but the cases will be much fewer and will not cause an emergency like the current one.

What percentage of the vaccinated population will give us the key to normality?

We do not know; Many factors influence: not only reducing the circulation of the virus, but also reducing the disease in risk groups and that depends on how the vaccine is distributed.

Will we have to learn to live with SARS-CoV-2?

It's not so much about learning: we are going to be living together, maybe it will even change its name, because SARS-CoV-2 is a very strange name for a pathogen that in the end will stay with us for a long time because it will become one more respiratory virus. Whether it will cause as many problems as the flu or less, we won't know until we see how many cases remain after vaccination.

To eradicate it, do we forget?

So much vaccination is needed that it will be very difficult to eradicate it. There are other viruses, such as measles or polio, that we are closer to eradicating and that should have priority, because they are also more dangerous than SARS-CoV-2.

And have you already been vaccinated?

Yes, at the hospital where I work. After the doctors and nurses who see patients, they vaccinated the staff who work with the virus.

I think New York is an example of a good pace of vaccination.

Yes, today vaccination has been opened to all people over 16 years of age.

Compared to the United States, Europe is going at a different speed. Will the pandemic evolve differently?

It is very difficult to say what is going to happen in each place. Cases may increase because it takes longer to vaccinate due to distribution problems or because there are many people who do not want to be vaccinated or because the measures are not maintained and infections increase.

There are people who feel relief knowing that they are more protected, but others relax and let their guard down.

You have to know that the vaccine is not one hundred percent effective: you have much less chance of being infected and also infecting someone, but it can still happen.

Are there vaccines better than others?

If you define 'better' as effectiveness, some are more effective than others, although no tests have been done against one another. But the most important thing is not how efficient they are in reducing the disease: 95%, 80%, but whether they are efficient enough to induce population immunity, which is what will make us return to normal. And normality is not achieved by me getting vaccinated, it is achieved by almost everyone getting vaccinated, regardless of the vaccine that is used. Population immunity will be achieved with any of these vaccines, they are sufficiently effective.

What would you say to those who are concerned about cases of blood clots in people vaccinated with Astra Zeneca?

There is no need to worry, there is no evidence that they were caused by the vaccine. Getting on a plane poses a greater risk of suffering a blood clot than with the Astra Zeneca vaccine.

The vaccine has been developed at breakneck speed, but the Covid-19 treatments have not. Why is it so complex to develop antiviral treatments?

We have been lucky that it has been a virus susceptible to vaccination. In antivirals there are many compounds that have to be tested and you don't know which one will work. It's a matter of a little luck. We have been lucky in vaccines, the virus is easy to contain by vaccination, but not in finding a medicine that is accessible to everyone and that can end the disease.

He is an expert on flu, will we one day have a definitive flu vaccine that avoids having to get vaccinated every year?

That's what we're working on. It is much more complicated than getting a vaccine against covid-19. There are three very different strains of flu circulating and we must try to stop all three; It is a more difficult vaccine to develop because it is different from the traditional ones.

Are many 'emerging' surprises awaiting virologists?

To the virologists and to everyone. Viruses are always very surprising. We don't know which one will jump next or when: it could be next year or it could take a hundred years. There is so much virological biodiversity that at some point there will be more viruses like this causing pandemics.