A phase I trial for a Zika virus vaccine began this week, but it won’t be ready for at least another year and a half, the NIH chief of Allergy Infectious Diseases said Sunday on 970 AM in New York.
“Vaccines don’t get done in a few months,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told “The Cats Roundtable” host John Catsimatidis. “The earliest we’ll have a vaccine, at best, if everything works, will be sometime in 2018.”
The interview comes in a week Senate Democrats sent a letter to Republican Senate leaders urging Congress to come back from recess in order to pass funding to address the Zika virus.
The Centers for Disease Control Prevention has given a travel alert saying pregnant women should not travel to Florida amid a local outbreak of the virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes. There have been more than 1,600 travel-related cases in the U.S., almost 400 of which were in Florida, according to Fauci.
Recently there were 15 cases of the virus spread locally in a very restricted area north of Miami, contracted by people who did not travel, he said. A vaccine is not the lone answer to avoid an epidemic.
“We have a problem there [in Florida],” Fauci said. “You control the mosquitoes and you can stop an outbreak. These are very resilient mosquitoes. They breed very voraciously and robustly in standing water.”
Asked if he would let his family travel to Brazil, Fauci said, “I have three daughters. If they might be pregnant, thinking of getting pregnant, I wouldn’t let them go.”