The future of the COVID-19 vaccine looks different than it does currently, with questions surrounding cost and even changes to how it's administered.
With the Biden administration set to end the public health emergency for COVID-19 on May 11, there are questions about how accessible COVID vaccines will be to the public and how much effort will be put into developing new, more effective vaccines for COVID variants that could evade antibody protection going forward.
"What that means is that eventually that supply is going to end, and the way that vaccines will be procured is that the federal government will still purchase some for some populations," said Jen Kates, senior vice president and director of global health and HIV policy at KFF.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are built on an mRNA platform, introducing a piece of mRNA that prompts the body to make and build an immune response to the spike protein on the virus. But future vaccine efforts are exploring options including live-attenuated viruses — which is what they use for chickenpox — or inactivated viruses — the style used for flu and polio shots.
In December, Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Research in San Diego and Dr. Akiko Iwasaki at Yale University published a letter in the journal Science asking for a government funding push to develop an effective nasal vaccine, similar to Operation Warp Speed for the original COVID vaccines in 2020."The argument for generating these mucosal vaccines is to prevent or reduce infection and transmission. The current vaccines are not very good at doing that.