European leaders are blunt: A coronavirus vaccine won't come soon enough

In separate, stark warnings, two major European leaders have bluntly told their citizens that the world needs to adapt to living with the coronavirus and cannot wait to be saved by the development of a vaccine. The comments by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson came as nations around the world and U.S. states are struggling with restarting economies blindsided by the pandemic. With 36 million newly unemployed in the U.S. alone, economic pressures are building even as authorities acknowledge that reopening risks new waves of infections and deaths.

Pushed hard by Italy’s regional leaders and weeks in advance of an earlier timetable, Conte is allowing restaurants, bars and beach facilities to open Monday ... and shops reopen. ’’We are facing a calculated risk, in the awareness ... that the epidemiological curve could go back up,” Conte said late Saturday. Conte added that Italy could “not afford” to wait until a vaccine was developed. Health experts say the world could be months, if not years, away from having a vaccine available to everyone ...

For his part, Britain’s Johnson speculated Sunday that a vaccine may not be developed at all, despite the huge global effort to produce one. “I said we would throw everything we could at finding a vaccine,” Johnson wrote in the Mail on Sunday newspaper. “There remains a very long way to go, and I must be frank that a vaccine might never come to fruition. Despite these efforts, we have to acknowledge we may need to live with this virus for some time to come,” Johnson wrote.

Coronavirus has infected more than 4.6 million people and killed more than 312,000 worldwide, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University that experts say undercounts the true toll of the pandemic. The U.S. has reported more than 88,000 dead in the pandemic and Europe has had at least 160,000 deaths.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-17/european-leaders-coronavirus-vaccine