The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention granted permission for most Americans to receive a Covid vaccine boostera shot on October 21st. It was so popular that 10 million people were able to obtain it before the approval. This is to make them feel safer. The United Kingdom's government made it feel less secure two days later when they announced the creation of Delta-plus. This new variant already accounts for 6 per cent of all cases in the country and is more infectious than the highly transmissible Delta.
These back-to-back events captured the pandemic roller coaster. Things are improving. They are not. They are. They are not. It is exhausting to keep repeating the same thing over and over again. This has led scientists from a variety of disciplines to ask: Could we make the roller coaster stop?
These researchers have published a number of papers and preprints over the past six months that propose a universal coronavirus vaccination that would protect against all members of this virus family. This includes the current SARS CoV-2 version, all variants that may not be protected by existing vaccines, as well as any new coronavirus strains that could cause pandemics.
This is a complicated project and no one group is close enough to achieving the goal. For years, universal vaccines have been unsuccessfully pursued against other genetically variable, recurring diseases, including influenza. Researchers believe a vaccine against coronaviruses may be possible, both because it is less complex genetically than the virus that causes flu and because the threat from another coronavirus pandemic seems uncomfortably real.
SARS-CoV-2, which is the third coronavirus that has become a major cause for human disease in less than a decade, follows MERS in 2012 and SARS 2003. Historical epidemiology indicates that there were coronavirus outbreaks in the 20th and 19th centuries, as well as possibly over millennia. It is possible that coronaviruses are still unknown in domesticated and wild animals. They could jump between species to cause havoc.
This is not the first coronavirus-related pandemic that we've seen, and it won't be the last. Pablo Penaloza MacMaster, a viral immunologist at Northwestern University and senior author of several papers describing approaches to creating a universal vaccine, said this: Preparation is the best way to be prepared for the next pandemic.
This is not the only reason that these research teams feel so urgently involved. The non-profit Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (a public-private partnership that channels government and philanthropic funds to worthy projects) announced in March it would invest up to $200 million in universal coronavirus vaccine research.
Here's the problem: In order to create a vaccine that protects against multiple strains or variants of a virus they have all been identified as having a common feature and our immune system reacts to it, researchers must find a way to make that feature part of the vaccine. They then have to include that feature in the vaccine. For example, the flu has tiny differences in the hemagglutinin protein. This is a hammer-shaped protein that attaches to receptors on the cells of the lungs. Researchers have divided flu viruses into different hemagglutinins based on their divergence. The search for a universal vaccine against the flu has been focused on redirecting the immune system's attention away from the variable head of each protein and towards the more manageable stem.
