First Coronavirus Vaccines may not be most effective, second line of defence is key, warn experts

Coronavirus vaccine update: Initial Coronavirus vaccines might not be the most effective against COVID-19, experts have warned. However, experts have claimed there would be slow but steady winners of the race against the highly contagious disease. Director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology at the University of Georgia Ted Ross has claimed that “the first vaccines may not be the most effective”. Ross himself has been working on an experimental Coronavirus vaccine, according to a New York Times report.

Several experimental vaccines are working on delivering protein in the human body that covers the surface of the coronavirus which is known as Spike. This propels the immune system to produce antibodies to fight the virus. However, many researchers are worried about this strategy. David Veesler, a Virologist at the University of Washington, “it would be a shame to put all our eggs in the same basket,” the New York Times report says.

Immunogenicity of the vaccine is the pivotal factor in deciding its efficacy. Antibodies are reliable for immune punch. There are blood cells known as ‘T-Cells’ which attack other cells that have been infiltrated by Coronavirus. However, Luciana Leite, a vaccine researcher at Instituto Butantan in Sao Paulo, Brazil has said “we still don’t know which kind of immune system will be important for protection,” the New York Times report says.

Experts have apprehensions that vaccines, which only rely on the antibody, may fail in the long run. That’s why the second line of defense in the form of T-Cells is crucial. Apart from this, a vaccine’s effectiveness will also depend upon the way it has entered into the human body. A nasal spray vaccine might be more effective than injecting into muscle one, as per the report.

So far, eight vaccine candidates are leading the race. University of Oxford-AstraZeneca’s ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine (AZD1222), Moderna-NIAID’s mRNA-1273, Pfizer-BioNTech’s BNT162b2, Russia’s Sputnik-V, Beijing Institute of Biological Products-Sinopharm, Wuhan Institute of Biological Products-Sinopharm, Sinovac, and Cansino have been undergoing the phase 3 human trials.