Ema, if doses arrive, immunity in Italy by September

"If AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and J&J manage to maintain the quotas and doses that they claim to be able to produce, I believe that the plan of the President of the Draghi Council can be a success. Including the summer that is coming, it

.

This was stated by

, speaking on "Buongiorno", on Sky TG24.

However, according to Genazzani, the speed of immunization depends "more on the number of doses that arrive than on the number of approved vaccines".

"At the moment - he specified - we have three vaccines in rolling review, Sputnik Curevac and NovaVax, and we hope all three will arrive as soon as possible. Until all the data have been submitted, we cannot predict when we will be able to have an opinion".

Of course, Genazzani added, "the more vaccines we have the better, because there will be more competition and we will be able to make choices about which ones we prefer, but at the moment I would rely on these four we have".

Instead, we are "a little behind" for the treatment of Covid.

"We have a couple of drugs that can improve patient prognosis, Remdesivir and corticosteroids," says the expert.

We are also starting to have combinations of monoclonal antibodies "which in very high-risk patients could be useful to reduce the impact in the hospital".

But with respect to these "there is still some organizational problem because they have to be given intravenously and because, until we can predict which patients may progress, we should give it to too many people".

"It may be that the vaccines lose some effectiveness with the variants and that it is necessary to make boosters with ad hoc vaccines that also cover the variants", but "I would not base any choice on a study of 400 patients", explained Genazzani. commenting on the recent Israeli study that Pfizer vaccine would be less effective against the South African variant of SARS-Cov-2.

"The variants are certainly a danger, it may be that there will be variants that will be able to bypass the vaccines and we could have a booster with a different vaccine", specifies the expert.

However, regarding the study that has been talked about a lot in the last few hours, he adds: "doing a study with 400 patients is very little to say how much vaccine protection is on a variant".

In any case, Genazzani concluded, "the faster we vaccinate, the less the variants will be able to emerge and therefore circulate".