With No Coronavirus Vaccine in Sight, Experts Push Other Shots

(Bloomberg) -- Since there’s no vaccine against the new coronavirus, health experts are pushing other injections in preparation for the worsening outbreak.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, the country’s top public health monitor, urged people to make sure they’re up-to-date on shots against lung infections such as whooping cough and pneumonia. A Sanofi executive earlier this month advised reporters at a media briefing to get their seasonal flu injections.

Preventing other disorders is important because an infection in an already weakened immune system can result in more serious symptoms, the Koch Institute’s president, Lothar Wieler, said at a press conference.

“At this time, the vaccinations that protect against lung infections are particularly important,” Wieler said.

Drugmakers such as GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson, Inovio Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Moderna Inc. are working to develop vaccines for the coronavirus that emerged in China late last year, but any product will require many more months of development.

Vaccines have been the subject of controversy since a 1998 study of 12 youngsters published in the Lancet medical journal linked a shot for measles, mumps and rubella to autism.

While all but two of the 12 authors of the study have since retracted its findings, the effects have lingered. The World Health Organization lists vaccine hesitancy as one of the 10 major health threats to the world, alongside climate change and lethal pathogens like Ebola.

“People should get the protection that they can,” said David Loew, who heads French drugmaker Sanofi’s vaccines business, at a briefing earlier this month. “It’s never too late to get a flu shot.”

Such preparations will help reduce the burden on health-care systems, Syra Madad, senior director, System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals, said in a tweet.

--With assistance from Rudy Ruitenberg.

To contact the reporters on this story: Naomi Kresge in Berlin at nkresge@bloomberg.net;Marthe Fourcade in Paris at mfourcade@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Eric Pfanner at epfanner1@bloomberg.net, Anne Pollak

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