No state can cope with annual COVID-19 vaccination — Italian expert - TASS

No healthcare system in the world can cope with annual vaccination against the novel coronavirus, said Andrea Crisanti, Italian full professor of Microbiology at the University of Padua.

According to the expert, 40 million people - or 70% of Italy’s 60-million population, will have to be vaccinated every year to maintain herd immunity against the novel coronavirus.

"It will be impossible to vaccinate 40 million people every year - not a single healthcare system anywhere in the world can cope with this load. And this will be a problem if annual vaccination against the novel coronavirus becomes necessary," he said.

The expert also commented on the new strain of the novel coronavirus, recently found in the United Kingdom.

"This variant is scary, because certain mathematical models demonstrate that this mutation - a result of a special selective sequence - increased the virus’s ability to replicate. Its R0 [the basic reproduction number, which denotes the expected number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are susceptible to infection] is higher, and there is nothing good about it. And, since certain mutations affect the spike protein, there is also a question about the efficiency of a vaccine, which is based on a different variant," the expert said.

Crisanti believes that it would be easier to reduce the number of infections to zero than to try to keep the outbreak under control, maintaining the Rt value (indicates the average number of people that one person with COVID-19 is expected to infect) below the threshold of 1.

Italy is among the world’s hardest-hit countries, with about two million cases registered since the start of the pandemic. More than 1.3 million patients have already recovered, about 70,000 died.