The emergence of new dangerous strains of the novel coronavirus may lead to a situation when annual modification of COVID-19 vaccines will be required, as is the case with influenza, Chief Scientist at the World Health Organization Soumya Swaminathan said during a question-and-answer session, APA reports citing TASS.
In her words, vaccine developers are now trying to answer the question of whether they can "modify their vaccines to face the threat with the future variant [of SARS-CoV-2]."
"Luckily for us so far, with the variants we’ve seen, the vaccines are still working against them," she said. "But we don’t know in the future, if there will be a variant that becomes not responsive to this vaccine."
In her words, developers and scientists want to be sure that they can quickly change their vaccines to make them effective against new variants of the novel coronavirus, and this work is already under way.
The World Health Organization is working with "developers and scientists, but also with regulators, to see how such a new modified vaccine could be quickly approved," she said.
"We’ve done this for influenza in the past. As you know, we have a new influenza vaccine every year, based on the composition of circulating strains of flu. So, something like that may be needed for COVID," Swaminathan continued. "We have to be prepared. At this point, we are not sure if <…> the same vaccines will continue to work against all variants [of SARS-CoV-2]."
According to the WHO, a total of 250,154,972 novel coronavirus cases and 5,054,267 deaths have been registered worldwide since the start of the pandemic. More than seven billion shots of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide.
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