Peter Hotez talks about the new variant BA.2, his Corbevax vaccine and a third pandemic summer.
Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s HospitalDr. Peter Hotez is celebrating a few milestones: Corbevax, a COVID-19 vaccine developed by a team he and Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi led, has reached 20 million children in India. Indonesia and Botswana also approved the protein-based vaccine last week.
Q: I feel like we always start with Texas. But for a change of pace, could you talk about how the Corbevax rollout is going in India? Q: You’ve long maintained Asia and Africa need the vaccines to halt variants that keep reaching here. How do you feel about future variants with these rollouts? A: So a few things about BA.2: BA.2 is not necessarily behaving in the same way the other variants of concern did. We saw the alpha variant and the delta variant go up as a percentage of total virus isolates in the U.K. followed immediately by a wave. Then the wave subsequently hit the U.S. BA.2 in western European countries, it’s not as straightforward. In some countries BA.2 is becoming a dominant variant and cases are up. In others it’s not dominant and cases are not going up.
A: Well, I think even for a pediatric vaccine, what we saw with both Pfizer and Moderna was that the dose of the vaccine was greatly reduced, the dose of the mRNA component. As a consequence, the immune responses were not as strong. We may have underdosed a bit too much. Whether it meets the immunological criteria to say the immune response is adequate to release them for emergency use is the big question. So they may wait for a third dose before they go and greenlight it.
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