With new variants popping up seemingly almost every day, many are wondering if there will at some point be a new vaccine that will protect people from every strain of COVID-19, even the ones that are recognized as the common cold.
Based on current research of people who’ve contracted COVID-19 and since recovered, people who have been vaccinated, and others, experts might be able to cobble something together "a new generation vaccine that basically takes all coronavirus threats off the table," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, on Wednesday’s Ask an Expert.
But it’s really early days to begin this discussion, said Adalja.
"This is a very promising area of research but I think it’s going to be several years before we see something come to fruition," he said Wednesday.
There are other factors to consider, he said, like how universal the vaccine should be in covering a multitude of viruses, including the milder ones.
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Even more pressing is the vaccine hesitancy.
"Hopefully that’s more specific to the pandemic itself and not something we see down the road when it comes to developing new vaccines against future threats," Adalja said.
The virus itself is not going anywhere, so a flexible solution is needed across the board. "We’re going to have COVID-19 cases 10 years from now,” he said. “It’s not magically going to disappear."
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