Are current vaccines enough?
Currently, the countries worldwide are accelerating to develop novel
vaccines and discover new antiviral drugs for control of the COVID-19
pandemic. And the World Health Organization (WHO) expects to end the
pandemic by 2022. Therefore, the wide coverage of vaccination in the
globe is necessary. However, how to test accurately asymptomatic general
population but with high viral load before large-scale vaccination (3),
since those are more likely to infect others. Definitely, there are
other questions which should be addressed on control and prevention of
the COVID-19 pandemic by vaccination.
Is current development of vaccines enough? As we know, there are still
the urgent need for novel vaccines against COVID-19 due to rapid
variants of the SARS-CoV-2. Second, do vaccines still effectively
elicite protective immunity after coronavirus variants? Whether current
major variants (Delta and Omicron) will weaken to stimulate immune
responses to the S protein of SARS-CoV-2 or not as well as the duration
of immunity? Third, there are rising rehabilitation and health workers
needs during the pandemic, but rehabilitation and related medical
resources are still scarce among many countries.
Thus, on the one hand, we should focus on development of multiple novel
vaccines or “universal vaccines” for targeting these variants.
However, since there are competing interests inherent in vaccine
development and shortcomings in bioethical resources, particularly
clinical equipoise conceptualizations, it’s not easy to get the best
treatment option for the general population. On the other hand, it’s
indeed time to train more health workers and discover more specific
antiviral drugs to combat the pandemic. Fortunately, there have already
had Molnupiravir (4), Paxlovid (5, 6), and Chinese combination of
BRII-196/BRII-198 (7). In addition, traditional Chinese medicine, small
molecules and plant-derived anti-SARS-CoV-2 agents may also have good
effects on combating new major variants (Delta and Omicron).