Friday, July 29, 2022

BA.5 and the overall mess.

 

BA.5 is a highly mutated version of the virus. Most likely the next versions will be driven by BA.5 and its variants. Thus an updated vaccine using mRNA from BA.5 spike may be good for a year are more but cleanly the original vaccine will fade in immunogenicity.

In a Medscape report they note:

Now the FDA is trying to prompt the companies to make the shots available sooner, potentially as soon as early to mid-September, according to The Washington Post . If the bivalent booster timeline can be sped up, the FDA will likely skip the authorization of second boosters of the original vaccines for all adults. The shift in strategy is facing mixed reactions. Some public health experts believe the move is the best strategy since three shots still protect most young, healthy adults from severe COVID-19. It could also improve booster rates in the fall...But other public health experts aren't sure that the new vaccines will be much better or dramatically improve antibody rates more than the current boosters. "People should not regard them as some sort of magic bullet that gives them super-strong protection. They are not going to be magic bullet game-changers, because they're not that much better than the already available vaccine boosters," John Moore, PhD, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, told NPR. What's more, the boosters may not be ready by September, and experts can't predict whether BA.5 will be the dominant virus in the fall and winter. "I don't see the benefit of waiting for a BA.5-specific booster since BA.5 may be in the rearview mirror and well past us by the time that's available," Peter Hotez, MD, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine National School of Tropical Medicine, told the news outlet.

First as we have argued from the very beginning there will be ongoing variants. We can sequence them and rapidly generate new vaccines to target the ever changing spike proteins. Unlike some of the above "experts" albeit changing variants is accepted but we must follow these changes with changing vaccines. In fact like flu shots perhaps we should have vaccines with multiple variants.