Vaccination against smallpox as seen by virologists
Galli, Viola, Pregliasco, Lopalco, Castelle Gattinara, Bassetti and Ferrante. They all more or less agree on how to deal with the smallpox vaccination that is being talked about again about 40 years after its suspension
In France, the National Health Authority (Has) has announced a monkeypox vaccination program following three confirmed cases of infection in the country. Immunization involves adults at risk of exposure to the virus, including healthcare professionals.
Here, on the other hand, is what our local virologists think about the cases of monkeypox and the vaccine.
GALLI
“I don't think we need to get vaccinated like in France. We are talking about a DNA virus that has not such ways of spreading that it must put us in a position to think about a generalized epidemic in the short term ". This is the comment to SkyTg24 by Professor Massimo Galli, full professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Milan.
The expert explained that, unlike smallpox, monkeypox " contracts less easily : with the passage of saliva, but not with sneezing with droplets that go up to two meters".
Furthermore, Galli added that "there is no need to think about a vaccine for this disease because lethality is very low, at least in Western countries" and there is a drug that works well: "we have it because a drug to be used in case of bioterrorism attacks with smallpox and 350 thousand different compounds have been used to find this extremely effective drug that inhibits a protein, P37, which has a 98% identity retained in all the viruses tested today ".
VIOLA
The immunologist Antonella Viola, scientific director of the Città della Speranza Pediatric Research Institute in Padua, joins Galli in the redimensional alarmism, explaining that according to the first sequences "the strain is always the known one and therefore not very aggressive" for which there has not been a mutation.
An "anomaly" that for Viola "must make us think" is instead that the virus at the moment seems to circulate "exclusively among young men, mostly between 20 and 40 years of age". "Since the contagiousness of the virus is independent of gender, if the virus were spreading due to its increased transmissibility we should have a comparable number of infections between men and women", concluded the immunologist.
PREGLIASCO
Virologist Fabrizio Pregliasco, a professor at the State University of Milan, also slows down on vaccination, who said in Adnkronos : "At this moment, in light of what remains limited for now, I believe that it is very early to think of a need for vaccination of young people ”, that is, of those not covered by the vaccination against smallpox, suspended in Italy in 1981 .
LOPALCO
The epidemiologist Pier Luigi Lopalco, professor of Hygiene at the University of Salento, explained that the raising of the emergency level decided by the WHO is only "a technical fact" because "if an emerging infectious disease crosses the boundaries more States, the WHO is required to intervene with coordination actions. For example, by imposing the mandatory reporting of cases ".
As for the hypothesis of re-proposing the vaccine against smallpox, according to Lopalco “extensive vaccination makes no sense” as “it is not a widespread disease; the probability of spread is low, moreover the clinical severity is not such as to worry public health too much ".
CASTELLE GATTINARA
Categorical is the comment of Professor Guido Castelle Gattinara, president of the Italian Society of Pediatric Infectious Disease, interviewed by the Journal : "At the moment, restarting the vaccination against smallpox would make no sense and the disadvantages would be greater than the benefits".
“People born before 1980 are almost all vaccinated – recalls the professor – The vaccine then protected against the human smallpox virus and today would also cover against a potential monkeypox, given by a virus 'cousin' of the human one. However, those who are not vaccinated risk nothing more, because the risk of getting infected is practically zero at the moment ”.
BASSETTI
The director of Infectious Diseases of the San Martino Polyclinic in Genoa, Matteo Bassetti, is more likely : “We cannot say to the population 'from tomorrow we will vaccinate you against smallpox', because it would mean that we are facing an emergency. It is possible to evaluate an immunization against smallpox on health workers and on some categories at risk, if any. But it is not the time to extend vaccination. Let's wait how the cases evolve and then we will decide ".
FERRANTE
Virologist Pasquale Ferrante, professor at Temple University in Philadelphia and medical and scientific director of the Città Studi Clinical Institute of Milan, believes that a "light supply" of smallpox vaccine could be a possibility to be evaluated also in Italy, but adds that “These decisions must be taken by the Government in agreement with the Regions, on the basis of the evolution of the numbers”.
Ferrante, among other things, hypothesized that at the origin of the recent cases that emerged there could be another possibility that "at the moment one can only hazard", that is "that there is an infection in some reservoir animals that are no longer only African, but also 'local', for example a rodent ".
The hypothesis starts from what happened in 2003 in the United States, where 47 cases of monkeypox were observed among humans following the importation of rodents from Africa, which had then come into close contact with local rodents.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/vaccinazione-contro-vaiolo-vista-dai-virologi/ on Wed, 25 May 2022 11:31:25 +0000.