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.
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.