‘Imperfect’ Covid vaccines may get nod in desperate bid to protect economies

Cobra Biologics is also working on a potential vaccine for the coronavirus in Keele, Britain, April 30, 2020. Picture: REUTERS/CARL RECINE

As countries emerge warily from lockdowns, leaders are looking to a preventive shot as the route to return to pre-pandemic life. Fuelled by billions of dollars in government investment, vaccines from little-known companies such as China’s CanSino Biologics and giants such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca are in development.

Covid-19 is already thought to be spread by people without symptoms, and a symptom-preventing vaccine may create even greater numbers of them. Another shot developed at the University of Oxford uses an innovative approach in which Covid genes are inserted into a different, harmless virus. Those make proteins that are recognised by the immune system, which raises defences against a real infection.

“That vaccine doesn’t look like it’s a knockout for protecting against infection, but it might be really very good at protecting against disease,” Fauci told the medical news website Stat.

But that’s risky and I worry when poor countries are front runners in vaccine trials.

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