Member-only story
A covid vaccine for your airways
The promising science of nasal spray vaccines.
The covid vaccine picture is awfully confusing. The current vaccines are doing a great job of preventing serious illness (at least, for people who are boosted), but they’re not nearly so effective at preventing infection and transmission. What’s more, the new variants are more contagious and less likely to cause severe infection, but they also appear to confer less immunity against re-infection:
At the same time, vaccine apartheid continues to reign supreme over the globe: the WTO’s vaccine waiver initiative stalled in the face of opposition from Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation, and the world’s poorest people are forced to serve as reservoirs and incubators for new variants.
But there’s promising news that addresses both of these issues: new vaccines that are royalty free, that offer superior protection and don’t require the extreme cold-chain or even the skilled needlework of the mRNA vaccines.
Writing today in her Substack, Katelyn Jetelina writes about two vaccines she describes as “game-changers”: CORBEVAX and NVX-CoV2373 (AKA Novavax):
