solarbird | First good news on COVID in a while

We finally have some new good news on COVID. This is the kind of vaccine I’ve been tracking and hoping for, and it’s testing well so far.

I’ve talked about “sterilising” vaccines in earlier posts. What that means – and I’m not sure I’ve ever said – are vaccines that stop viral loading on contact, or close to it. Vaccines which prevent that initial infection from taking hold. Now, not being some kind of nonsense force-field, they can’t stop it from ever making contact and landing on your tissues – but they can try to stop its initial setup.

That’s what the nasal vaccines are hoping to be.

See, the problem is – and I’m not an immunologist, I don’t know the details – is that the whole upper respiratory tract has a lot of its own ideas about immune function, for no doubt good evolutionary reasons. But a downside to that is that intramuscular vaccines aren’t picked up well by that tract. It’s not that they aren’t picked up at all – they are! – but it’s going to be pretty incomplete.

And that’s all terribly oversimplified and vague but it gets the idea across, I hope.

If you’ve ever had to deal with allergies, you may have noticed that oral antihistamines and nasal antihistamines behave very differently. (I certainly have.) Same phenomenon, in very rough terms.

These sorts of vaccines are intended to inform the upper respiratory system directly. They get the full load. What you’d hope for at that point is higher immune memory and stronger initial-infection blocking.

In first trials, that’s exactly what this does. In a big way. It’s still entirely preliminary, of course. But we’re behind the curve on this. This is a known technology. In general, it works. There’s no reason it shouldn’t work here, given the right formulation, which is what a lot of the experimentation is about.

And I will be the first in queue to get one, when I can.

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