What next for covid-19 vaccines?

Will we continue to need annual covid boosters?Eleanor Riley, professor of immunology at the University of Edinburgh, says, “It will be really interesting to see, when these new [variant] specific vaccines start to get rolled out at the end of the year, whether they make a huge difference or not.” All the main vaccines currently in use target the spike, which is susceptible to frequent mutation.Other vaccines that present more of the virus do exist. For example, Valneva’s vaccine—approved for UK use last April1—uses an inactivated form of the whole SARS-CoV-2 virus that can’t infect cells or replicate in the body but can still trigger an immune response. Two of the available Chinese vaccines, Sinopharm and CoronaVac, are also based on inactivated virus, as is Covaxin of India. Their published efficacy rates (from tests conducted before covid-19 variants arrived) are lower than those of the commonly used vaccines from Pfizer-BioNtech,…
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