Vaccines injected against the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 have been hugely successful, saving nearly 20 million lives worldwide in their first year of use and reducing the death toll from the pandemic by about 63%, according to a recent study. However, as good as these vaccines are, they have not stopped the virus from spreading from person to person.
As the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads, it changes. This helped to upgrade our defenses, either through immunity created by vaccines or after we recovered from an infection. That’s why, in the third year of the pandemic, we are in the midst of another wave of Covid-19 caused by the most immunoevasive variant so far, BA.5. And more variants are coming.
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Even as vaccine makers race to update first-generation vaccines in hopes of patching up our protection, other scientists are taking a different approach, making vaccines delivered via nasal sprays or pills that would deploy more frontline immune defenders in the body. : the mouth, nose and throat.
“The hope is to bolster the defenses in the nose so the virus can’t even replicate,” said Dr. Ellen Foxman, an immunobiologist at the Yale School of Medicine. “And so someone who has a really effective mucosal vaccination can’t really support viral replication or produce viruses that can infect other people.”
“That would be like the Holy Grail,” said Foxman, who helped plan this week’s meeting of the International Congress of Mucosal Immunology in Seattle, which is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Janssen and Merck.
If it works, there is hope that mucosal immunity could slow the development of new coronavirus variants and ultimately bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control.
There is a long way to go before that happens, however, and many scientists say the approach needs an injection of funding to accelerate the pace of development, in the same way that the billions of dollars distributed by Operation Warp Speed delivered. in the first generation of Covid-19 Vaccines in record time.
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