The extraordinary vaccination of more than four billion people, and the lack of access for many others, were major forces this year — while Omicron’s arrival complicated things further.
2021 was the year of COVID-19 vaccines, but it was also the year of variants. Researchers identified a trio of SARS-CoV-2 ‘variants of concern’ in late 2020 and early 2021,. They seemed to spread faster than earlier circulating viral lineages, and scientists worried that these variants might also blunt the effectiveness of vaccines.
Despite these challenges, the vaccines are still doing a good job at protecting against the most severe forms of COVID-19, says Laith Jamal Abu-Raddad, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Weill Cornell Medicine–Qatar in Doha. “We now have lots of data and we see a very clear pattern that the vaccines are working very well against severity.”, designated a variant of concern in late November.
Other upcoming COVID-19 vaccines are being formulated so that they can be administered by mouth or inhaled through the nose, such as nasally administered vaccines being developed by CanSino and AstraZeneca. Because these vaccines would be administered directly into the tissues that SARS-CoV-2 first infiltrates when it enters the body, it is hoped that oral or nasal vaccines could work well to prevent infection. They would also require fewer trained health-care personnel to administer injections.
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