Current vaccines

When the pandemic started, scientists at Garvan immediately began performing vital research, allowing the global scientific community to better understand the virus and develop new ways to treat and prevent infection. The current vaccines are our best line of defence against COVID-19 and we are grateful to all of the scientists and frontline workers who worked tirelessly to develop and deploy the vaccines. They have saved millions of lives and have been highly effective in reducing hospitalisations and saving lives. However, most current vaccine development is aimed at developing variant-specific vaccines following a new variant emerging. This reactive strategy, by definition, results in a significant lag between the emergence of a new variant and the development of an appropriate vaccine.

This means that future variants will also likely escape current vaccine defences.

Our research has revealed that the majority of antibodies produced by both current COVID-19 vaccines and following natural infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus target highly “variable” sites that the virus can easily mutate. As a result, these antibodies are significantly less effective against emerging variants of the virus and there remains an ongoing need to continually update vaccines to protect against new strains. This strategy of constantly playing “catch up” and formulating vaccines reactively poses the risk that the virus will mutate faster than health strategies can react to.