Centre works with private sector for next-gen covid shot

“Our aim is that these next generation covid vaccines should not be repeated with multiple doses. Only one vaccine dose should be enough to provide long- lasting immunity and should be able to protect from future viruses. While some pharma companies are planning to develop strain-specific vaccines, others are doing research to develop bivalent vaccines (by mixing one or two viruses). A lot of research and development is being done on these lines,” said an official from the health ministry.

A spokesperson at Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech said, “Bharat Biotech team is actively working and developing next generation covid vaccines. Bivalent vaccines, intranasal vaccines, etc are under development.”

A single catch-all vaccine may help countries avoid situations of vaccine avoidance. In India, for instance, only around 20% of those eligible have taken the booster dose.

Experts said current vaccines continue to provide high levels of protection against severe disease and death for all variants of covid-19, the emergence of Omicron variant has rapidly displaced other circulating variants globally to become dominant and causing substantial epidemic waves in all 6 WHO regions.

Poonam Khetrapal, WHO regional director, South-East Asia (SERO) “Covid-19 has continued to evolve since SARC-CoV-2 emerged in late 2019 and it is likely that this evolution will continue resulting in the emergence of new variants. The WHO’s technical advisory group on covid-19 vaccine composition, is constantly assessing the implications of emerging variants on the performance of covid-19 vaccines has advised that the inclusion of Omicron in an updated vaccine composition is likely to be beneficial in populations that have already received a covid-19 vaccination primary series.”