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).