A new vaccine is being developed as the rest of the country and the Bay Area grapple with the BA.5 subvariant of Covid-19.
Mosaic-8, the new vaccine being developed at Caltech and Oxford, is raising questions about what it might offer to combat the most transmissible COVID subvariant.
Experts say the Mosaic-8 vaccine could be a game changer as it is unlike anything we have seen so far.
The big caveat is that it is still in very early stages of testing and phase 1, which would be human testing, could only take place sometime this year.
If the vaccine becomes a reality, it may hold promise for fighting not only COVID-19, but other viruses as well.
Mosaic-8 uses nanoparticle fragments from eight coronavirus strains, including COVID-19, meaning it could protect against future variants and new strains, according to the researchers.
“I think the great hope is that, with this type of vaccine, we will be able to protect the population from a future COVID, Sars or Mers,” Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease expert at UCSF, told the NBC Bay Area.
This gives a glimpse of how health experts are looking to the future to tackle viruses and hopefully prevent a future pandemic.
Currently, the BA.5 Ómicron sub-variant is spreading throughout the country.
Chin-Hong said that we are not in a surge, but we are on a plateau at a high point and we are not going down.
Hospitalizations remain low, but there is growing concern that hospitals are starting to see more patients who are not vaccinated.
“Vaccines will continue to be great at preventing serious illness, hospitalization and death,” Chin-Hong said. “But they are becoming more difficult as a strategy to simply prevent infection, and infection can cause a lot of disruption in society.”
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