A UNIVERSAL VACCINE AGAINST COVID

three years into the pandemic, scientists are still engaged in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with the coronavirus: They devise a vaccine that provides immune protection, only to have the virus mutate into a form that at least partially evades that protection. It happened in 2021 with the Delta strain of SARS-COV-2, which causes COVID-19, and has continued through a succession of Omicron subvariants.

To outsmart the coronavirus, scientists have been working on vaccines that are more broadly effective against SARS-COV-2 and all its variants—and perhaps against other coronaviruses that harass us humans. In September, a team at the Francis Crick Institute in London got good results in lab rats by targeting the S2 region of the coronavirus’s spike protein, which is considered less likely to mutate than the S1 region that current vaccines target. In July, scientists from Caltech and elsewhere published research on a vaccine candidate that provided protection to mice and nonhuman primates from several COVID variants as well as the first SARS virus in 2003. All told, about a dozen efforts are underway—and next year, some winners may emerge. fred guterl