CSL Limited CEO Paul Perreault is joining a team of scientists and medical experts across the world urging caution in properly developing a COVID-19 vaccine.
“Everybody wants to get everybody to speed up and try to get rid of red tape,” the CEO told the Financial Times. “But a reason that some of that tape is there is for safety purposes, when you know you’re going to have to be given billions of dosages of this vaccine, you want to make sure you’re doing the right thing.”
CSL includes locally operated CSL Behring in Bradley, whose namesake is currently developing five projects targeting COVID-19. The US is currently planning to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people with the first successful candidate, former Harvard Medical School Professor Dr. William Haseltine recently told Scientific America.
Such concerns in hasty developed vaccines are real. In 2016, Dengavxia, intended to protect children against the dengue virus, dramatically increased hospitalization rates for kids receiving the vaccine. Dengue disease is the most common mosquito-borne viral disease in the world. By May 2019, the FDA approved had approved Dengavxia.
