Some flu and COVID-19 symptoms can be confused: fever, dry cough, sore throat or chest, trouble breathing. These are diseases that especially affect the respiratory system and, in the case of the first, vaccines are seasonal, that is, they are updated every year and must be repeated.
Both COVID-19 and the flu are caused by viruses. The new coronavirus is caused by SARS-CoV-2 and the flu by the influenza virus. Both diseases they also coincide in the form of contagionas they are transmitted when airborne droplets are inhaled from the cough or sneeze or the breath of someone who has the flu or COVID-19.
On the other hand, experts from different countries have assessed that in SARS-CoV-2 might not be eradicated, but instead would become an endemic disease, just like the flu, which presents seasonal outbreaks.
Matthew Duchars, Executive Director of the UK Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Center (VMIC for its acronym in English), announced last Tuesday that this institution is working on the development of a combined vaccine for influenza and COVID-19 which could greatly ease the logistical burden of responding to recurring outbreaks of both diseases.
The initiative announced in the United Kingdom, which could materialize next year, will be added to another of that type published last May by Novavax, from the USA. The US laboratory had then released the first data of its research on possible combined vaccines for COVID-19 and influenza that had been promising, based on the results of animal tests. The combination is made between SARS-CoV-2 NVX-CoV2373 with its own formulation against influenza NanoFlu.
Such an inoculant “will save a lot of time and it would be much more convenient to give it in one shot, so it is something that we and the vaccine developers and producers will be looking at,” Duchars told The Telegraph. “Let’s say we need to give a seasonal vaccine, and people need a vaccine for the flu, a vaccine for COVID-19 and another for something else. If you can put them all in one, then obviously it is preferable, “he said.
“It would be much more practical to make just one puncture, so that will be one of the aspects that we and the producers (of vaccines) are going to study,” he summarized.
VMIC is already working to establish the possibility of combining both influenza and COVID-19 vaccines in a single injection to accelerate vaccination. Immunization against SARS-CoV-2 is taking place at an accelerated rate in central countries, although much more slowly in nations with fewer resources.
The global count of administered doses is close to 4.8 billion injections, according to data collected by Our World in Data on vaccination around the world. A campaign that advances in around 200 territories and countries around the planet. Vaccination is especially widespread in the European Union, where more than 62% of the population already has at least one dose. North America follows, where the first dose reached half the population in early August. Latin America touches this figure in the middle of the month and Asia – which raised its proportion of vaccinated after an update from China in mid-June, in which it added 622 million citizens to its count – is further behind. Meanwhile, Africa has not yet been able to vaccinate even 5% of its population, according to figures from the countries that provide data.
VMIC was created by several universities with support from the UK government in 2018 and was planned to go live for vaccine development within five years. With the arrival of the pandemic, the plans accelerated and the Boris Johnson administration doubled its budget, with funds of 215 million pounds (about 298 million dollars) so it is currently about to be put into operation. Combining COVID-19 vaccines with influenza vaccines will be one of his first projects.
According to official data, the center will have the capacity to manufacture 70 million vaccines in a period of four to five months. Duchars said the government plans to use the VMIC starting next year.
“For this year’s vaccination and current dose levels, the government has all of that covered in terms of what they need to make,” Duchars explained. “In our discussions, His plan is to use VMIC for the revaccination campaign in 2022. That is what we have refocused our efforts and attention on ”.
Combination vaccines, or vaccines that protect against multiple diseases, are already common. For example, the prevalent fourth or fivefold call, which is applied in Argentina as part of the mandatory vaccination plan between 15 and 18 months of age, includes diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) and hepatitis b, in the case of the quintuple. The same goes for the widely administered MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella.
The first investigations in the same sense that Novavax carried out were published on the bioRixiv prepress server last May and reported a “positive immune response” against both COVID-19 and influenza when administered to ferrets and hamsters. Novavax said it would begin human clinical trials later this year.
A month later, that American biotechnology company gave details of its study by noting “The safety, immunogenicity, and efficacy profile of a COVID-19 vaccine when co-administered with seasonal influenza vaccines.”
“This is the first study to demonstrate this and the results suggest that concomitant vaccination may be a viable immunization strategy,” the researchers noted in the preliminary paper under review.
Overall, Novavax’s NVX-CoV2373 vaccine shows 89.8% efficacy in an ongoing placebo-controlled Phase III study. When the researchers gave a smaller group of 431 volunteers from the same study a flu vaccine at the same time, the effectiveness dropped slightly to 87.5%.
“These results demonstrate the promising opportunity for concomitant vaccination, which can lead to higher vaccination rates and greater protection against both viruses.” the study co-author told Medscape in June, Raja Rajaram, MD, Europe, Middle East and Africa medical affairs leader at Seqirus, the company that supplied the influenza vaccines for research.
Other vaccine and healthcare manufacturers, including the pharmaceutical company Sinovac in China and the NHS in the UK, have conducted trials on the safety and efficacy of administering COVID-19 and flu vaccines one after the other.
Duchars, head of VMIC, stated that the British biotechnology center, in which the Oxford University, Imperial College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, It will be in a position to produce about 70 million doses of vaccines in a period of between four and five months, once it is operational.
He pointed out that the United Kingdom already has a guaranteed supply of vaccines for 2021, so the production that leaves the new manufacturing center will not be necessary until next year.
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