Pfizer announced Tuesday that a large international study found vaccinating moms-to-be was nearly 82% effective at preventing severe cases of RSV in their babies’ most vulnerable first 90 days of life.
The vaccine quest isn’t just to protect infants. RSV is dangerous for older adults, too, and both Pfizer and rival GSK recently announced that their competing shots also proved protective for seniors.
For most healthy people, RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is a cold-like nuisance. But for the very young, the elderly and people with certain health problems, it can be serious, even life-threatening. The virus can infect deep in the lungs, causing pneumonia, and in babies it can impede breathing by inflaming tiny airways.
“For a period of 20 years, even though science was advancing, nobody wanted to go near development of an RSV vaccine,” Schaffner said. In 2013, McLellan and virologist Barney Graham were working at the National Institutes of Health when they homed in on the correct shape and figured out how to freeze it in that form. That finding opened the way to today’s development of a variety of experimental RSV vaccine candidates.WHEN CAN PARENTS EXPECT THE RSV VACCINE TO BE AVAILABLE?
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