Companies effort a universal vaccine
Scientists fear the omicron shots coming this fall won’t be much better at keeping people from getting COVID-19 than what’s come before. That’s pushing drugmakers to start working on next-generation vaccines that don’t have to be updated that often, if at all.
Testing shows that omicron-specific vaccines under development at Moderna and the partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech will be “little or no better” than the currently available boosters, according to John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Both Moderna and Pfizer said their omicron-specific vaccines raised more antibodies to the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants than current formulations. But the concern remains that the virus is changing so quickly, boosters simply can’t keep up. Today’s dominant variants may have been replaced by new strains come late September when the new shots are ready, said Greg Poland, head of the Mayo Clinic’s vaccine research group. The U.S. needs to focus efforts on next-generation vaccine technology to give more durable protection, said Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.
“Even with the highly flexible platform of mRNA, which is more flexible than virtually anything we’ve had before, it’s going to be very difficult to keep up with the pace of newly evolving variants,” Fauci said in an interview. “Which gets us to the question: What about a pan-coronavirus vaccine?”
Pfizer’s leaders had earlier suggested they weren’t focusing on development of an all-encompassing shot. But in June, Pfizer and BioNTech research showed their bivalent omicron-adapted vaccine candidates neutralized BA.4 and BA.5, though to a lesser extent than the original omicron variant, BA.1, prompting the Biden administration to ask for shots that were focused on the newer subvariants.
The original vaccines remain protective against severe disease and hospitalization. But as new variants continue to emerge, the shots, which are based on genetic material from the original strain that spread from China’s Wuhan province, have become less effective at preventing infections because they’re so different from the variants currently circulating.
“We’re pretty much screwed,” Poland said, unless drugmakers come up with shots offering stronger protection.