Developing a new version of the vaccine would probably face significant regulatory hurdle, and thus take time.
There’s an expectation for new variants to become dominant every few months.
The vaccine industry is either way going to sell as many vaccines as it can produce for the foreseeable future.
There doesn’t seem to be a huge incentive for vaccine companies to go through the pain and expense of developing a new vaccine version, which would only be useful for a few months, and which just displaces sales from its existing vaccine instead of creating new sales.
Developing a new version of the vaccine would probably face significant regulatory hurdle, and thus take time.
According to Pfizer, it should take 100 days. If they would have started that when it become clear that Delta will be soon the prevailing variant, we would have had access to the updated vaccine for a few months.
There’s an expectation for new variants to become dominant every few months.
The best prediction seems to be those new variants will be varients of what’s currently the most common variant and thus a vaccine that’s updated against delta will be nearer to new variants.
The vaccine industry is either way going to sell as many vaccines as it can produce for the foreseeable future.
That’s an argument why the companies don’t want to do it on their own but not one for the lack of political pressure on them. It would be one of the main things a politician like Biden could do to actually fight the pandemic if that would be a political priority.
I’m not an immunologist, but if new variants develop from the last new dominant strain (i.e. a new dominant strain would evolve from delta as a start-off point), would that not still give a delta-specific vaccine an edge against future variants as compared to the original vaccines?
This argument doesn’t really track for me. The vaccine industry is not a monolith and normal market competition should provide plenty incentives to produce a better vaccine than your competitors. Not to mention that the researchers and executives there likely have other motives than pure profit as well.
Trying to push out a revision costs money and doesn’t earn any expected money. And everyone knows this is so. Unofficial market collusion regularly manages to solve harder problems; you don’t need explicit comms at all.
I’ll grant that we’ll hear some competitive “ours works better on variant X” marketing but a new even faster approval track would be needed if we really wanted rapid protein updates.
As evhub mentions, the antibodies you make given the first vaccine you’re exposed to are what will get manufactured every time you see a similar-enough provocation. It may be impossible to switch the learned immune response without some specially designed “different enough” protein that’s hoped to also be protective against the latest variant. I buy the ‘original antigenic sin’ concept—there has to be a reason we’re not naturally immune to flu and corona-colds already after many previous encounters.
Given that
Developing a new version of the vaccine would probably face significant regulatory hurdle, and thus take time.
There’s an expectation for new variants to become dominant every few months.
The vaccine industry is either way going to sell as many vaccines as it can produce for the foreseeable future.
There doesn’t seem to be a huge incentive for vaccine companies to go through the pain and expense of developing a new vaccine version, which would only be useful for a few months, and which just displaces sales from its existing vaccine instead of creating new sales.
According to Pfizer, it should take 100 days. If they would have started that when it become clear that Delta will be soon the prevailing variant, we would have had access to the updated vaccine for a few months.
The best prediction seems to be those new variants will be varients of what’s currently the most common variant and thus a vaccine that’s updated against delta will be nearer to new variants.
That’s an argument why the companies don’t want to do it on their own but not one for the lack of political pressure on them. It would be one of the main things a politician like Biden could do to actually fight the pandemic if that would be a political priority.
might be true, but about the other points:
I’m not an immunologist, but if new variants develop from the last new dominant strain (i.e. a new dominant strain would evolve from delta as a start-off point), would that not still give a delta-specific vaccine an edge against future variants as compared to the original vaccines?
This argument doesn’t really track for me. The vaccine industry is not a monolith and normal market competition should provide plenty incentives to produce a better vaccine than your competitors. Not to mention that the researchers and executives there likely have other motives than pure profit as well.
Trying to push out a revision costs money and doesn’t earn any expected money. And everyone knows this is so. Unofficial market collusion regularly manages to solve harder problems; you don’t need explicit comms at all.
I’ll grant that we’ll hear some competitive “ours works better on variant X” marketing but a new even faster approval track would be needed if we really wanted rapid protein updates.
As evhub mentions, the antibodies you make given the first vaccine you’re exposed to are what will get manufactured every time you see a similar-enough provocation. It may be impossible to switch the learned immune response without some specially designed “different enough” protein that’s hoped to also be protective against the latest variant. I buy the ‘original antigenic sin’ concept—there has to be a reason we’re not naturally immune to flu and corona-colds already after many previous encounters.