Boosters, 2nd Generation, 3rd Generation Covid vaccines

[TorquayFan]

In another thread, 'Boosters could weaken the Immune System', thanks to Partington for elucidating - " if you keep injecting the same antigen too frequently, the response to that antigen won't be as great."

 

Repeated boosters are not the long term answer to the Pandemic - as has been observed, we can't vaccinate the whole World every 6 months !

 

2nd Generation vaccines projects, of which there are very many, generally seem to be addressing existing strains of the virus.

 

In the journal 'Nature', attention is drawn again to the importance of T-cells in providing longer lasting immunity  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00063-0?  Also here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7584424/

 

CEPI - awareness of the need for a 'Universal vaccine' - https://cepi.net/news_cepi/going-universal-the-search-for-an-all-in-one-coronavirus-vaccine/

 

The US Army has some early development of a 'Universal'  https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2021/12/us-army-creates-single-vaccine-effective-against-all-covid-sars-variants/360089/ (that thread now down to Page 3)

 

The Wellcome Trust sees the problem https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/11/wellcome-trust-covid-vaccines

 

Here's a DT article on Scancell's 'Universal' - 'Covidity' in trial in RSA atm - https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fglobal-health%2Fscience-and-disease%2Fexclusive-universal-vaccine-can-conquer-covid-variants-could%2F

 

We need NEW and WIDER ACTING vaccines - there's a massive amount of resource ready to go when the right project comes along.

 

 

Edited January 12, 2022 by TorquayFan

[TorquayFan]

Roll on improved vaccines !!

 

"The Covid-19 vaccines available today are amazing feats of science. Researchers achieved in less than a year what can sometimes take decades: They targeted a new virus with multiple highly effective vaccines that have reached billions of people. They deployed new approaches like using messenger RNA and adenovirus vectors at large scales for the first time, making some of the biggest leaps in vaccine technology in hundreds of years. But the limitations of these vaccines are becoming apparent, which is why some scientists are calling for an even bigger leap forward in vaccine technology. They envision a universal coronavirus vaccine that could counter every known variant of the virus that causes Covid-19, and even variants that haven’t emerged yet. It’s possible such a vaccine could protect against the whole family of coronaviruses, bolstering long-term immunity and slashing the risks of similar pandemics in the future.

 

This work is urgent because scientists are finding that protection from Covid-19 vaccines fades over time. And the virus itself is changing, mutating in ways that make it harder for the immune system to counter. The omicron variant has already caused breakthrough infections in large numbers of vaccinated people, and it’s a matter of time before the virus mutates again."

 

https://www.vox.com/22876661/universal-covid-19-vaccine-variants-omicron

[TorquayFan]

The arrival of Omicrons and the lessening or end of the pandemic - IMO there's lots of interest in this 'Nature' article . . . 'Rapid spread', 'Difficult to model', 'Vaccination differences', 'Waning protection' and :-

""So, how will it end? Not with Omicron, researchers predict. “This will not be the last variant, and so the next variant will have its own characteristics,” Medley says. Given that the virus is unlikely to disappear completely, COVID-19 will inevitably become an endemic disease, scientists say. But that’s a slippery concept, and one that means different things to different people. “I think it’s the expectation that the general behaviour is somehow towards the situation where we have so much immunity in the population that we would no longer see very deadly epidemics,” says Sebastian Funk, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The transition to endemicity, or “living with the virus” without restrictions and safeguards, is difficult to model with any accuracy, he adds. That’s partly because even the best disease models struggle to make sensible forecasts beyond a few weeks ahead. It’s also because endemicity reflects a judgement call on how many deaths societies are willing to tolerate while the global population steadily builds up immunity.

For Woolhouse, COVID-19 will truly become endemic only when most adults are protected against severe infection because they have been exposed multiple times to the virus as children, and so have developed natural immunity. That will take decades, and it means many older people today (who were not exposed as children) will remain vulnerable and might need continued vaccinations. That strategy has its flaws. Some of those exposed as children will develop long COVID. And it relies on children continuing to show much lower rates of severe illness as variants evolve.

There are no guarantees that the next variant will be milder, but Tang says that seems to be the pattern so far. “This virus is getting milder and milder with each iteration,” he says.""

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00210-7?

Surely in the future, vaccination covering Covid viruses will become as routine as those for 'flu?

 

 

Edited February 3, 2022 by TorquayFan

[TorquayFan]

The first 7 minutes on BBC R4 'Inside Health' - Prof Beate Kampmann, the Director of The Vaccine Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

She emphasises that vaccine induced immunity is much stronger than natural immunity. There are 118 next generation vaccines in development atm. Antibodies are the 'lowest hanging fruit' thus get measured to watch immunity.

Around 4 mins - she notes the need for vaccines to address the whole if the virus and around 6 mins, says the advent of the next generation vaccines is one year off.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013zpq