As the coronavirus ravages Maryland and most of the globe, some doctors say an approved vaccine is a year or more away. There are 580 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Maryland as of Thursday morning — the largest single-day increase. There were 423 confirmed cases in the state on Wednesday. Four Marylanders have died from the virus.
“There’s a pace to all of this,” Dr. Panagis Galiatsatos, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told MarylandReporter.com in a phone interview earlier this week. “If I gave you equipment to build a car — even with the best instructions and all the right equipment — it will take you time…The same thing with a vaccine. Even if we had all the proper equipment and all the proper bloodwork — we need about a year just to be able to assure that the vaccine works and is safe.”
Dr. Marilyn Singleton
Dr. Marilyn Singleton, who is a California-based board-certified anesthesiologist and a board member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, echoed similar sentiments.
“Certainly the vaccine trials have already started — which is great. And generally it takes a year at the minimum to get a vaccine going because you’ve got to give two doses and that has to be eight weeks apart, and then you have to see whether it does anything. So to test a vaccine — it’s not something that you just make and then say: ‘Ok, I’ll give it once and that’s that.’ ”
Galiatsatos said “supportive therapy” is the best way to treat the coronavirus because many of the treatments that are currently being discussed are not appropriate for everyone.
“Right now the best way to manage coronavirus-19 is really supportive therapy. If you are dehydrated while you have this virus, we will hydrate you. If you need more oxygen, we’ll give you more oxygen. If you can’t breathe on your own, we’ll place you on a ventilator for the time being. That’s it.
“The medications that you hear being discussed at the administrative level — we really reach into them as a last resort…We have plausible reasons to suspect that they can work but they are not what we would indicate for everyone.”
Singleton echoed similar sentiments.
