Is A Nasal Vaccine The Answer To COVID-19 Pandemic?

With a new subvariant of COVID spreading across America, scientists are working on a nasal vaccine that they think will be even more effective than shots at preventing infection.

NBC News reported that nasal vaccines “have the potential to prevent infections entirely” because they raise immunity exactly where the virus enters the body.

The nasal vaccines “concentrate the immune protection in the upper airway,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, told NBC News. That means the “antibodies that are trying to protect you from having the virus enter your body, are right there on the front lines protecting you.”

“A traditional shot in the arm, you get what’s called systemic immunity, namely antibodies build up that are essentially distributed in different organs of the body,” Fauci said. That, he said, is why people who contract the virus now after being vaccinated — including Fauci himself — have far less severe symptoms.

The nasal vaccine would work as a booster after original shots of the full vaccine.

But the nasal vaccine won’t be available until next year at the earliest. Scientists are now testing a modified version of a virus that usually infects birds to attack the virus and has already been found to generate immune responses in mice.

And it’s still up in the air if a nasal vaccine will be successfully created. But “any product that looks promising, I can assure you, the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] would be very anxious to look at it,” Fauci said.

Talk of the new nasal vaccines comes two days after White House COVID coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha declared the new BA.5 subvariant “the most immune evasive” and urged older Americans and those with compromised immune systems to take a booster shot.

The vaccines and boosters that Americans took were targeted at the original strain, and while it offers protection from severe illness with other variants, Jha said that is limited.

“We’re still seeing some protection against infection but not as much,” Jha told ABC “This Week” co-anchor Martha Raddatz on Sunday. “This is that immune evasive nature of this virus. So if you got your booster let’s say last November or December, you don’t have as much protection against this virus as you’d like.”

Top U.S. health officials are now recommending another booster shot for most Americans, and a panel that advises the FDA is working on a new one that could be released this fall that would target the Omicron variant and its subvariants, including BA.5.

Joseph Curl has covered politics for 35 years, including 12 years as White House correspondent for a national newspaper. He was also the a.m. editor of the Drudge Report for four years. Send tips to [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @josephcurl.

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