Sunday, January 2, 2022

We need vaccines

[A]s the pandemic enters year three without signs of abatement, it's time to think about new strategies for containing the contagion.

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Indeed, the ideal vaccine cocktail may include injectable and intranasal components.

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The holy grail of herd immunity — the percentage of the population that would need to be immune to the virus through infection or vaccination — is a receding target. The already challenging estimate was thought early in the pandemic to be near 70 percent coverage. After the first variants, the estimate increased to near 80 percent. And with the more transmissible omicron variant, it is now estimated that, if it could be reached at all, it would require more than 9 out of every 10 to be vaccinated.

The most important factor in the emergence of variants is unvaccinated people within whom SARS-CoV-2 reproduces and evolves to even greater fitness for growth in humans.
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A shift to less invasive intranasal vaccines should result in improved compliance.

  The Hill
Not in the US, it won't.
[N]one of the intranasal vaccines in development are as perishable as the RNA vaccines. In short, intranasal vaccines should be less expensive to manufacture, transport and administer.
That would help.

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