Researchers recently told Reuters that regular booster vaccine shots will be needed to stop the spread of novel coronavirus variants in the near future.
- The booster vaccines “will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity,” the British researchers told Reuters.
According to Reuters, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 ends up mutating every two weeks. This will require tweaks to vaccines.
- “We have to appreciate that we were always going to have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t last forever,” Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics U.K., told Reuters. “We already are tweaking the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution — so there are variants arising that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response.”
Context
COVID-19 vaccine developers are already developing vaccine booster shots to combat the variants from Brazil, South Africa and the United Kingdom, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.
- COVID-19 vaccine developer Pfizer said in January it will look to create a third shot to make the vaccine effective against the coronavirus variants, according to NBC News.
- Moderna recently said it will conduct a trial to develop a third shot, which would work to combat variants, too, as I wrote about for the Deseret News.