Better Covid vaccines are on the way. Word of the WHO
What the WHO expects about the new anti Covid vaccines. Bloomberg's article
New Covid-19 vaccines, including those that do not require needles and can be stored at room temperature, may be ready for use at the latest this year or next year, the World Health Organization chief scientist said. – Bloomberg reports .
Six to eight new vaccinations could complete clinical trials and undergo regulatory review by the end of the year, said Soumya Swaminathan, the Geneva-based agency's chief scientist.
The new vaccines will join the 10 that have already been shown to work within a year of the Covid-19 pandemic declaration. The world needs more vaccinations, especially as the continued circulation of the virus generates dangerous new variants and drug manufacturers struggle to fulfill orders. Only 122 countries have started immunizing people, according to data collected by Bloomberg.
"We are thrilled with the vaccines we have," said Swaminathan, an Indian pediatrician best known for her research on tuberculosis and HIV. But "we can still improve," he said. "I think, until 2022, we will see the emergence of better vaccines."
The current crop of experimental vaccines uses alternative delivery technologies and systems, and includes multiple single-shot inoculations, and vaccines that are administered orally, through a nasal spray, and through the skin using one type of patch. These could lead to immunizations that are better suited to specific groups, such as pregnant women, according to Swaminathan.
More than 80 candidate vaccines 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 begun testing updated versions designed to counter the coronavirus variants that have emerged in recent months.
RECALL INJECTIONS
"We need to continue supporting the research and development of more vaccine candidates, especially since the need for continued population booster immunization is still not very clear at this point," Swaminathan said. "So we have to be prepared for this in the future."
The WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Immunization Experts is reviewing whether people who have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 should have two doses of the vaccine. Some research indicates that a natural infection works to trigger the immune response to SARS-CoV-2, just as a first dose would, rendering a second injection useless.
Giving just one dose of the vaccine to Covid-19 survivors could free up more supplies, Swaminathan said, although it could present "practical and logistical challenges in many countries" if blood tests are needed to measure patients' antibody levels before decide if a second vaccine is justified.
The launch of safe and effective vaccines is also raising questions about how to conduct clinical trials of experimental vaccines efficiently and ethically, he said. Placebos will be replaced with a "gold standard" vaccine in a so-called non-inferiority design when it is no longer ethical to use a placebo, Swaminathan said.
GLOBAL TRIAL
Meanwhile, one approach that WHO is exploring is to compare three or four candidate vaccines simultaneously with a placebo. A similar study design was used to test the efficacy of drug therapies for Covid-19, and it could mean that study participants would have an 80% chance of receiving an experimental vaccine and only a 20% chance of receiving the vaccine. placebo.
"We are now in discussions with several companies with vaccines in development to see if we could launch something similar on a global test platform," Swaminathan said, adding that she is optimistic such a study could begin in the first half of 2021.
A global trial involving a large pool of people and countries offers several benefits, he said. Testing vaccines in different ethnicities, age groups and people with different medical conditions makes the results more generalizable, and when the outbreak subsides in some parts of the world it is often still active in others, he said.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/sono-in-arrivo-migliori-vaccini-anti-covid-parola-delloms/ on Sun, 21 Mar 2021 06:49:56 +0000.