- Now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all adults, people are looking ahead to what next year holds for COVID-19 and the future of vaccination.
- At the New Economy Forum this week in Singapore, Bill Gates said he expects that by mid-2022, deaths from COVID-19 and infection rates, in general, will drop lower than those for seasonal flu, so long as a new dangerous variant doesn’t crop up.
- If we really expect our vaccines to prevent asymptomatic infection, mild infection, and completely prevent transmission, that’s a very high bar for a vaccine.
People are looking forward to what next year holds for COVID-19 and the future of vaccination now that the Food and Drug Administration has approved COVID-19 vaccine boosters for all adults as reported by Fast Company.
Pharmaceutical predictions
At the New Economy Forum this week in Singapore, Bill Gates said he expects that by mid-2022, deaths from COVID-19 and infection rates, in general, will drop lower than those for seasonal flu, so long as a new dangerous variant doesn’t crop up.
That’s an even shorter timeline than pharmaceutical heads have predicted.
Pfizer, meanwhile, is in the process of developing a separate mRNA-based flu vaccine, which could be given at the same time as a COVID-19 vaccine.
What could complicate matters, he says, is the large number of people who remain unvaccinated and who have not developed immunity through infection.
By contrast, the reason the FDA approved a COVID-19 booster is not that the virus has changed, but because immunity is waning.
“At the same time,” Sette admits, “we don’t really know.”
COVID contagious as flu?
It doesn’t seem to mutate nearly as much as the flu virus, according to Sette.
The other reason has to do with how the immune system functions in humans. A third shot, it seems to reason, will have a longer-lasting effect. Sette points out that protection against hepatitis B, for example, lasts indefinitely after the third vaccination.
Immunity may have declined in those who received two doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but a third treatment could have a greater impact.
According to Sette, the amount of time between when shots were given and when they were given could affect how effective they are. However, he claims that a longer interval between immunizations yields greater results, and there is reason to suppose that a third inoculation will be more effective and last longer.
Dr William Moss, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s International Vaccination Access Center, feels that a yearly COVID-19 vaccine is improbable. People who received three doses, as well as those who were infected with COVID-19, may have learnt enough to prevent severe COVID-19 infection indefinitely.
In that situation, COVID-19 could become one of the many respiratory ailments we fight every year if we don’t get vaccinated every year. “It’s a very high bar for a vaccine if we genuinely expect it to prevent asymptomatic infection, moderate infection, and total transmission,” Moss adds.
Another virus
A new COVID-19 variant could jeopardise public health attempts to control the virus’s transmission and the development of new, highly effective mRNA vaccines to combat it.
While a new strain could emerge that is impervious to current vaccines, according to Moss, “there are evolutionary constraints on the virus.”
This has to do with the protein found in SARS-spike COV-2, which allows the virus to adhere to our cells.
“A blend of different antigens from different flu strains is already regularly exploited,” says Sette of the La Jolla Institute of Immunology.
“There’s no evidence that a vaccine against many SARS subtypes is required,” Sette explains.
“However, it’s doable if that’s the case.”
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Source: Fast Company
