Crucial Tool Against SARS-CoV-2 on the Horizon

For a few weeks, when I have the opportunity to do so, I’ve been telling family and friends about the main path I see out of this pandemic. I’ve been saying it can be done. Now it turns out that someone has been working on it and has gotten through Phase I trials (for which results are not yet published). Phases II & III are still ahead.

It was a mistake for so many governments to portray the vaccines we have now as the complete solution. They are magnificent achievements. They were developed astoundingly quickly without skipping the essential safety and efficacy checks. Until their effects fade, they do an amazingly good job of reducing the severity of initial COVID illness and reducing the number of people left with LongCOVID.

But they are not so great at completely preventing infection. Vaccinated people can still catch the virus and spread it, especially when other mitigating measures such as high quality face masks, social distancing, avoiding group gatherings (especially indoors), and so on are absent or incomplete. In addition, some effects of the vaccines fade relatively quickly, reducing the amount of help they give us. Our vaccines help us survive the virus but don’t thoroughly block it from infecting us.

As long as the virus is still able to find new hosts, we will not be rid of it.

The vaccines we have fight back against the virus, but are not enough to starve it out. They are also designed to base their work on portions of the virus that are subject to mutation. Significant new variants render our vaccines less effective, sometimes by a lot, and appear often enough to prevent us from being able to vaccinate the world against the forms of the virus that are in circulation.

There is a way to make a vaccine that can prevent infection, relies on portions of the virus that change rarely, and produce protective effects that last a long time. There’s no such thing as a perfect vaccine, so we will still need mitigating measures for a while after we have the improved vaccine. It will be worth the wait. It will enable us to vaccinate the world without having the vaccine become ineffective in mid-campaign, and it will block infection so we can starve out the virus. It requires time and a different approach from the designs of current vaccines, but it can be done.

That vaccine will make it possible for us to do to SARS-CoV-2 what we did to smallpox.

Fortunately, Dr. Katelyn Jetelina has just published a better explanation than I could hope to provide. Click the link and you’ll see what I mean.