Why Covid new vaccines should be ready within a year, otherwise the situation does not improve

New Covid-19 vaccines should be ready in a year or less before the first Covid-19 vaccines become ineffective and require modified formulations, according to a study by epidemiologists, virologists and infectious disease specialists.

Scientists have long stressed that a global vaccination effort is needed to satisfactorily neutralize the Covid-19 threat. This is because of the threat of virus variants - some of which are more contagious, deadly and less susceptible to vaccines - that are emerging.

The prediction that new vaccines will be needed in a year or less comes from two-thirds of respondents, according to the People's Vaccines Alliance, a coalition of organizations including Amnesty International, Oxfam and UNAIDS, which surveyed 77 scientists from 28 vend. Nearly a third of respondents indicated that the timeline is likely to be nine months or less.

Low vaccines in many countries would make vaccine-resistant mutations more likely, said 88% of respondents who work in prominent institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Yale, Imperial College, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine University of Edinburgh.

"New mutations arise every day. Sometimes they find a place that makes them more capable than their predecessors. "These variants can transmit more efficiently and potentially evade immune responses to previous species," said Gregg Gonsalves, associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, in a statement.

"If we do not vaccinate the world, we leave the playing field open to more and more mutations, which could bypass our current vaccines and require other boosting doses to fight them."

Covax - the global vaccine coalition that aims to counter so-called vaccine nationalism - hopes to be able to supply at least 27% of the population of lower-income countries with vaccines by 2021.

Source: Guardian