A vaccine that protects against several coronavirus mutations similar to the flu shot may be needed in the future, an expert on immunology has said.
Going forward, coronavirus vaccines will need to adapt, with the same vulnerable people being given it every year, according to Professor David Salisbury.
Prof Salisbury, a former immunisation director at the Department of Health, made the comments during a virtual discussion at the Chatham House think tank on Wednesday.
Seasonal flu vaccines are multivalent, meaning a single shot often protects against several mutations of the virus, and coronavirus vaccines could take a similar path in the future.
“The model comes to mind very quickly that this is just like seasonal flu. Because we now vaccinate against seasonal flu, with four separate influenza viruses in our vaccine”, he told a coronavirus briefing.
“We don't think twice about having four different virus strains in our seasonal flu vaccine. And we don't think much about having the same people vaccinated every year to protect them against seasonal flu. So, in the medium and longer term I would be surprised if we continue to depend on a single virus coronavirus vaccine.”
He warned that the likelihood of eradicating the virus everywhere in the world was low, meaning that humanity would need to learn to live with it.
Global vaccine sharing programmes such as Covax are vitally important, but it was likely that global enthusiasm to vaccinate everyone around the world each year is likely to wane, he said.
“My prediction is that interrupting transmission on a global scale through vaccination is going to be probably impossible, therefore we will have to think about other steps.”
“We cannot vaccinate even high risk populations everywhere in the world every year, and we don't do that for flu.”
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David Heyman, a former WHO epidemiologist, said he believed society would need to adapt to coronavirus much like it does with tuberculosis and other viruses such as HIV.
“There's some element of learning to live with this virus that societies will have to come to terms with, and what scale of illness and death they're willing to tolerate.”
“What we’ll have to try to do is deal with this infection as we do with TB, which causes deaths regularly, and HIV, and other infectious diseases. So, it's not a matter of this being a special disease. This is one of many that we will have to balance our living with and understand how to deal with it as we deal with influenza, as we deal with other infections."
