In the coming months, scientists project that Covid could kill tens of thousands of Americans. The cost of infections keeps piling up, too: Long Covid sufferers are battling persistent health problems. And millions are missing work because they catch the virus, exacerbating labor shortages.
No next-generation vaccines are as close at hand, or as likely to reduce the spread of the virus, as those that can be inhaled or sprayed into the nose.
By generating immunity in people’s airways, where the coronavirus first lands, those vaccines can potentially help extinguish infections before they begin. Immunity delivered by a shot in the arm, on the other hand, takes longer to attack the invading virus, giving people good protection against serious disease but not to the infections that spread the virus and let it evolve.
China, India, Russia and Iran have all approved vaccines delivered through the nose or the mouth, even though they have not released much data about how the products work.
In the United States, nasal sprays have been held back by the same funding constraints and logistical hassles that, before the pandemic, often made developing vaccines a decade-long ordeal. The delay could not only weaken the country’s defenses against a more lethal coronavirus variant but also hurt preparations for a future pandemic, depriving the world of an oven-ready nasal vaccine platform that could be adapted to a new pathogen.