RE: Covid29 Jan 2023 23:37
Thanks Roses - some extracts from your link :-
"It’s past time to move beyond chasing variants and put real resources into developing vaccines that offer longer-term protection, or can transform the disease into a something that most of us don’t even realize we have and are much less likely to transmit.
Developing next-generation vaccines won’t be easy. Even if they show promise in the lab, proving that they work in humans presents an immense challenge now that much of the world has moved on from Covid. Funding for big trials has dried up and running those studies has become increasingly difficult. The population now has a mix of immunity from vaccines and infections, and the bar is high — showing a shot is more durable or leads to less transmission is harder to measure than showing it keeps people out of the hospital.
That doesn’t mean newer vaccines aren’t worth the effort. Better shots might motivate more people to take them — so far, only 16% of Americans have gotten the latest bivalent booster. And anything learned in their pursuit will help us not only in the fight against Covid, but in dealing with whatever pathogen comes next.
During last week’s FDA advisory meeting, frustration was palpable that we continue to employ a strategy that relies on chasing variants with updated boosters, ones that we know provide only a modest improvement over earlier shots, and offer a limited window of protection at that.
Taking a flu-like model with the current variant-targeted Covid shots is “essentially a Band-Aid strategy,” says John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The only real long-term solution is better vaccines.” " . . .
. . . "One thing that could help: a more sophisticated understanding of our immune response to both vaccines and infection. So far, the world has largely focused on levels of neutralizing antibodies generated against the virus, a measurement that clinical studies have allowed us to correlate to protection against severe disease.
But researchers have been clamoring for more attention to be paid to other types of immune cells, such as T-cells and other components that might be important for specific types of protection. It could become easier to run vaccine studies if we knew how to correlate those other immune components to, say, asymptomatic disease versus severe disease." . . . and . . .
Sign In
Follow the stocks
