While the general public may still be holding out hope that COVID-19 will just go away, the pharmaceutical industry is preparing for the COVID-19 line of business to be recurring and long-lasting, a Forbes report says. 

“Our thesis as a company is Sars-CoV-2 is not going away, we are going to deal with this virus we think forever,” said Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel. The way forward, he said, is to stay on top of the variants and mutations and “to very quickly find a regulatory pathway to evolve our product so that we can keep protecting people.”

There are still many unknowns surrounding the duration of the vaccine’s protection and how frequently people will need to receive boosters: Moderna said days ago its vaccine’s immunity can last a year; on duration of immunity, Pfizer is still unsure for its own vaccine.

“We’re bullish about what our vaccine is going to be able to do to respond to the various mutations and variants,” said Angela Hwang, group president of biopharmaceuticals at Pfizer, which is partnered with BioNTech. She, however, acknowledged that at some point there might be a need for a new vaccine all together. 

But part of the beauty of mRNA, the technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, is that it would be relatively easy to produce a new vaccine within a matter of weeks, instead of the usual several years.

It is critical to continue long-term studies of patients in trials to understand the durability of the vaccine response, said Hwang. “We see this as a durable business,” Hwang noted. “It’s a business and piece of research that we’re going to have to continue to do for a long time.” 

Bancel said if Pfizer and Moderna are able to hit their Operation Warp Speed contract goals with the US, which is targeting a combined 400 million vaccines delivered by the end of the second quarter, the country “will be one of the first countries of size to get sufficient protection.” On the other hand, “I would not be surprised if it takes Europe until the end of the year,” he stated. 

Other vaccines exist, but doubts exist about their efficacy.

The most important thing from a public health standpoint is getting any vaccine with more than 50 percent efficacy available as quickly as possible, the Forbes report notes. 

“There will be more pandemics. It’s impossible to predict when,” said Monsef Slaoui, outgoing director of Operation Warp Speed. “We need to be even faster and better equipped for the next one than we have been for this