“Well in 2022, we will see the emergence of better vaccines,” said Soumya Swaminathan.
The new Covid-19 vaccines, including those that do not require needles and can be stored at room temperature, may be ready for use later this year or next, said the chief scientist at the World Health Organization.
Six to eight new immunizations can complete clinical studies and undergo a regulatory review by the end of the year, Soumya Swaminathan, the chief scientist at the Geneva-based agency, said in an interview on Saturday.
New vaccines will be added to the ten that have already proven to work a year after Covid-19 was declared a pandemic. The world needs more immunizations, especially as the continuous circulation of the virus generates dangerous new variants and drug manufacturers are struggling to meet orders. Only 122 countries have started to immunize people, according to data collected by Bloomberg.
“We are thrilled with the vaccines we have,” said Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician best known for his research on tuberculosis and HIV. But “we can improve even more,” she said. “I think that, in 2022, we will see the emergence of better vaccines.”
The current crop of experimental vaccines uses alternative technologies and delivery systems and includes more single-dose inoculations and vaccines that are administered orally, through a nasal spray, and through the skin using a type of patch. This could bring more appropriate immunizations to specific groups, such as pregnant women, according to Swaminathan.
More than 80 vaccine candidates are being studied in people, although some are still in the early stages of testing and may not be successful. Companies with Covid-19 vaccines already in use have also started testing updated versions designed to prevent the coronavirus variants that have emerged in recent months.
Booster Shots
“We need to continue to support the research and development of more vaccine candidates, especially since the need to strengthen the immunization of populations is still not very clear at this point,” said Swaminathan. “So we need to be prepared for that in the future.”
The WHO strategic advisory group of immunization experts is looking at whether people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 need to receive two doses of the vaccine. Some research indicates that a natural infection works to prepare the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, just as a first dose would do, making a second injection unnecessary.
Giving just one dose of the vaccine to Covid-19 survivors could free up more supplies, said Swaminathan, although it can present “practical and logistical challenges in many countries” if blood tests are needed to measure patients’ antibody levels before deciding whether a second injection is guaranteed.
The launch of safe and effective vaccines is also raising questions about how to conduct clinical trials of experimental vaccines efficiently and ethically, she said. The placebos will be replaced by a “gold standard” vaccine in a design called non-inferiority when it is no longer ethical to use a placebo, said Swaminathan.
Global Test
In the meantime, an approach that the WHO is exploring is to compare three or four vaccine candidates simultaneously with a placebo. A similar study design was used to test the effectiveness of drug therapies for Covid-19 and could mean that study participants would have an 80% chance of receiving an experimental vaccine and only a 20% chance of receiving a placebo.
“We are now discussing with several companies with vaccines under development to see if we could launch something like this on a global testing platform,” said Swaminathan, adding that he is optimistic that this study could begin in the first half of 2021.
A global test involving a broad group of people and countries offers several advantages, she said. Testing vaccines in different ethnicities, age groups and people with different medical conditions makes the results more generalizable, and when the epidemic subsides in some parts of the world, it is often still active in others, she said.
(This story has not been edited by the NDTV team and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)