U.S. falls behind on producing new shots

Operation Warp Speed, the Trumpera program that poured billions of dollars into developing COVID-19 shots, seemed to signal a new dawn of American vaccine making, demonstrating how decades of scientific grunt work could be turned into lifesaving medicine in a matter of months.

But as a third pandemic winter begins in the United States, its vaccine-making effort has lost steam. Efforts to test and produce next-generation COVID-19 vaccines are bogged down by bureaucratic problems and funding shortfalls. Foreign rivals have raced ahead in approving long-awaited nasal-spray vaccines, including one invented in St. Louis, creating a scenario in which Americans would have to travel abroad for the latest in American vaccine technology.

The Biden administration has launched a last-ditch effort to restore the country’s edge.

In a bid to resurrect Operation Warp Speed, President Joe Biden asked the lame-duck session of Congress last week for $5 billion for next-generation vaccines and therapeutics, as part of a broader $9.25 billion pandemic spending request. But Republicans, having blocked requests for next-generation vaccine funding since the spring amid complaints about how the White House spent earlier pandemic aid allocations, have shown no signs of dropping their resistance.

As a result, even with the pandemic still taking a heavy toll, prospects have dimmed for the two most coveted kinds of next-generation vaccines: nasal sprays that can block more infections, and universal coronavirus shots that can defend against a wider array of ever-evolving variants.

In the coming months, scientists project COVID-19 could kill tens of thousands of Americans. The cost of infections keeps piling up, too: Long COVID-19 sufferers are battling persistent health problems. And millions are missing work because they catch the virus, exacerbating labor shortages.

No next-generation vaccines are as close at hand, or as likely to reduce the spread of the virus, as those that can be inhaled or sprayed into the nose.

By generating immunity in people’s airways, where the coronavirus first lands, those vaccines can potentially help extinguish infections before they begin. Immunity delivered by a shot in the arm, on the other hand, takes longer to attack the invading virus, giving people good protection against serious disease but not to the infections that spread the virus and let it evolve.

China, India, Russia and Iran have all approved vaccines delivered through the nose or the mouth, even though they have not released much data about how the products work.

In the United States, nasal sprays have been held back by the same funding constraints and logistical hassles that, before the pandemic, often made developing vaccines a decadelong ordeal. The delay could not only weaken the country’s defenses against a more lethal coronavirus variant but also hurt preparations for a future pandemic, depriving the world of an oven-ready nasal vaccine platform that could be adapted to a new virus.

Last month, a nasal version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine failed in a trial, an outcome that investigators said could have resulted from too much of the spray being swallowed and broken down in the stomach.