V11 Next Generation Vaccine Platforms for COVID-19
Herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2 would require vaccination of ~67% of the population14, which is an average and would not prevent clusters of susceptible individuals.
Two important risk groups for developing severe COVID-19, elderly (>65 years old) and obesity (body mass index > 40) have previously been linked to reduced vaccine efficacy using classical vaccination approaches17,18.
Major hurdle will be large-scale manufacturing
Outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) virus of the H5N1 subtype was diagnosed in Hong Kong in 1997, with 18 human cases including six deaths. This was the first known outbreak of influenza A virus resulting from direct transmission of an avian influenza virus from chickens to humans without an intermediate reservoir such as pigs1
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) in 2002 put everyone on alert for a while, but this pandemic was contained through old-fashioned contact tracing and isolation procedures after causing >8,000 cases in 27 countries4.
Subsequently, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic turned out to be relatively mild, with a low case fatality rate5.
The Ebola virus epidemic in West Africa in 2013–2016 was a turning point. Whereas the largest previous Ebola virus outbreaks had resulted in several hundred cases in confined areas, this epidemic resulted in close to 30,000 cases in ten countries and took more than three years to bring under control6.
Main advantage of next-generation vaccines is that they can be developed based on sequence information alone.
Next-generation vaccine platforms for COVID-19 | Nature Materials