VAKCINA

“Unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed’s SpFN uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein.” https://t.co/iqfJId3kOS by @TaraCopp

— Caitlin M. Kenney (@caitlinmkenney) December 22, 2021

Bahrain approves second booster shot for those who received three doses of Sinopharm vaccine
Following approval by the Vaccination Committee, the National Medical Taskforce for Combatting the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has announced that a second booster shot has been approved for individuals aged 18 years and above who received three doses of the Sinopharm vaccine (first dose, second dose, and first booster shot), after 3 months of taking the first booster shot.
The Taskforce explained that eligible individuals can take the Pfizer-BioNTech or the Sinopharm vaccination as a second booster shot.

One year on, China's Sinopharm vaccine proves most popular jab in Serbia
There are no queues at Belgrade's largest vaccination hub in Serbia. The interest in the vaccination against COVID-19 started dwindling as the pandemic showed signs of a significant slowdown in the country. 
Every day in late October around 45,000 people were being vaccinated, these days, the numbers are only a quarter of that. And only 58 percent of 7 million Serbian citizens have been vaccinated since the process started last January.
"We have administered more than 8 million vaccine doses," Zoran Bekic, head of the Belgrade Fair Vaccination Center told CGTN. "There have been no deaths caused by the vaccines or adverse effects of the immunization. The Sinopharm vaccine, of all the vaccines we used, produced the least reactions."
Compared with other countries globally, Serbia offers one of the biggest choices of vaccination to its citizens. There are five vaccines available, including those produced in China, Russia, and the U.S. and almost a year after the roll-out started, China's Sinopharm jab is still the most sought after.
One of Serbia's top virologists, Tanja Jovanovic, a professor from the University of Belgrade, explained: "In our country, the largest interest came from people wanting the Sinopharm vaccine ... regardless of their age or education. Obviously, the prevailing opinion here is that it's proven effective for combating new diseases and the way to go."
Тhe Sinopharm vaccine was the first to arrive in Serbia. A batch of 1 million doses came at the beginning of 2021 when it was the most urgently needed. And shortly after their arrival, the mass vaccinations started.
The Serbian health officials claim Sinopharm's product was widely accepted as an effective measure against the coronavirus. Thanks to investment from China, the nation decided to embark on a joint project to build a factory to produce the vaccine in Serbia. The work is under way on the outskirts of Belgrade and the first batches should leave the factory gates by the summer of 2022. After that, the doses produced there will be delivered to the entire country and some of its neighbors.

Tokyo researchers work toward 'dream' COVID-19 vaccine that gives protection for life

BY OSAMU TSUKIMORI
STAFF WRITER

Dec 29, 2021

Researchers in Tokyo are developing a “dream” COVID-19 vaccine that offers lifetime efficacy, in what would be a game-changer as the fight against the coronavirus drags on into its third year.

At a time when it appears most COVID-19 vaccines will require periodic boosters due to a decline in recipients’ antibody levels, the creation of a vaccine with lifetime efficacy could lead to huge financial savings globally and give the world an upper hand against the coronavirus, which has infected more than 270 million people and claimed more than 5 million lives around the world.

Soon after the pandemic began, in early 2020, Michinori Kohara, emeritus investigator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, wondered if it was possible to develop a vaccine based on the tried and tested smallpox vaccine — which helped the world eradicate the deadly disease. The vaccinia virus used in the smallpox vaccine is a subject he has worked on for over three decades, and Kohara knows firsthand how significant a vaccine that gives strong protection for life can be.

The smallpox vaccine was developed by British doctor Edward Jenner in 1796 to counter the infectious disease, which had an extremely high mortality rate. In Japan, there has been no patients since 1956 and the government’s periodical vaccination ended in late 1970s. The vaccine remains the only shot that has successfully eradicated an infectious disease, with the last known case being a patient in Somalia in 1977 after a coordinated global vaccination campaign by the World Health Organization.

So in April 2020, Kohara, in cooperation with the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, started developing a recombinant vaccinia virus containing the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19. They picked the nonpathogenic strain of the vaccinia virus variant called DIs, which works as an extremely effective and safe viral vector for delivering the SARS-CoV-2 spike gene.

While the messenger RNA COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. have been successful in preventing severe illness and death, neutralizing antibodies fall significantly over six months after vaccination, making boosters necessary — particularly against the omicron variant.

In contrast, the vaccine that Kohara is spearheading can produce potent neutralizing antibodies within a week of inoculation and induce the strongest cellular immunity of any vaccine, he says. That would be significant as none of the currently available COVID-19 vaccines appear to offer long-term protection.

Experiments on mice using the recombinant vaccinia virus encoding the highly pathogenic avian flu HA gene have shown high antibody levels that were maintained for more than 20 months, or nearly the average life span of a mouse, and all vaccinated mice infected with the avian flu 20 months post-vaccination survived. In contrast, the unvaccinated mice all died.

The project, in which Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike has expressed her enthusiasm, has been undertaken as part of special research sponsored by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.

“I have worked on various vaccine technologies such as the adenovirus and messenger RNA, but the vaccine using the vaccinia virus vector is the most powerful of all with few side effects,” Kohara told The Japan Times in an interview. “The characteristics of this vaccine is that it can induce antibodies and lifelong immunity. One shot of the vaccine keeps its efficacy for more than 20 months, and there is no other vaccine that can achieve these effects.”

Tests on crab-eating macaques also showed that the vaccine protected primates from developing pneumonia, and that the amount of the virus detected in their lungs was below the detection limit seven days after infection with the coronavirus.

Domestic drugmaker Nobelpharma Co. is set to conduct first and second phases of clinical trials of Kohara’s vaccine in Japan within the first half of 2023 on 150 to 200 volunteers, including those who have experienced infections and fully vaccinated individuals. If efficacy and safety are confirmed, the final phase clinical trial is set to start immediately afterward, with commercialization targeted for 2024 at the earliest, he says.

One of the biggest hurdles for the vaccine is securing the several tens of billions of yen needed to conduct the last clinical trial, as Kohara says Nobelpharma cannot fund it alone. Although the government has allocated more than ¥100 billion to subsidize large-scale clinical trials by domestic drugmakers, there has been no plan to subsidize the project’s clinical trials as Nobelpharma and the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science have no prior experience of commercializing a vaccine, Kohara said.

“I hope the government will change its mind once the first two stages of clinical trials show efficacy in humans,” he said. “Or we would be looking to conduct the trial in collaboration with a major drugmaker as a more promising choice,” he said.

While tests on mice have shown that one shot would induce enough neutralizing antibodies for lifelong protection within a week of vaccination, Kohara said two shots taken three weeks apart have increased neutralizing antibodies tenfold.

Kohara says the vaccine also has an edge in terms of side effects at a time when worries over high fevers and myocarditis, especially in young men, have put a damper on the COVID-19 vaccine campaign. Though no vaccines are said to be completely without side effects, vaccinia viruses have been safely used in the smallpox vaccine for more than two centuries and the vaccinia vaccine variant DIs used in the vaccine can no longer replicate in mammals. That means it would likely cause much fewer side effect reactions compared with other COVID-19 vaccines, he said.

Unlike AstraZeneca’s chimpanzee adenovirus vaccine vector used in its COVID-19 shot, the vaccine developed by Kohara uses a smallpox vaccine strain that has already been used as a vaccine and whose efficacy and safety have been established as a vector, noted Tetsuo Nakayama, a project professor at Kitasato Institute for Life Sciences and director of the Japanese Society of Clinical Virology. Nakayama is not involved in the development of the vaccine.

“Prior to the eradication of smallpox in 1980 the smallpox vaccine was used until 1976, and virtually all of the people born before 1976 have received it,” he said. “Though mice that received the smallpox vaccine have a confirmed immunity effect, there could be a reduced immunity effect in humans” who received the smallpox vaccine.

Such concerns over reduced efficacy have been also raised for vaccines using adenovirus as a vector to deliver genes or vaccine antigens as experts say the previous vaccine recipients could have pre-existing immunity against the vector itself, which could diminish the vaccine’s efficacy.

Kohara says he has found a solution to such concerns. Vaccines are typically administered into the muscle beneath the skin or into the subcutaneous fat. If the recipient received the vaccinia virus vaccine via these conventional methods, there’s been evidence showing that a seldom used method of intradermal inoculation, a shallow injection just under the skin, would ensure the efficacy of the vaccine without any problems, he said.

Lab tests have also confirmed the vaccine’s broad efficacy against coronavirus variants, including delta. While there were four different vaccines developed globally for various variants of avian flu, Kohara says efficacy against all coronavirus variants has been shown from his single vaccinia vaccine candidate. The vaccine will likely show efficacy against the omicron variant as well, he added.

Another advantage of the vaccine is its ability to be stored long-term in a dried form at room temperature, which would be particularly beneficial for developing countries with tropical climates.

“The current situation is that we would need to be vaccinated as often as every three or six months, and we would need to make new vaccines whenever new variants of concern pop up,” he said. “So if our vaccine’s efficacy lasted for even a year, two years or three years, that would translate to huge savings worth trillions of yen to the social infrastructure as a whole. The vaccine also has high cross-immunity to work against many variants, so these two things alone justify making this vaccine.”

Israel will now allow people above the age of 60 and medical staff to receive a fourth dose of the coronavirus vaccine.

Read more >> https://t.co/eFTvKtiRZ0

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) January 2, 2022

Mór Thököly wrote:Jedino pametno. I kod nas treba svima preko 60 i kojima je proslo 4-5 meseci. Nikakvog razloga nema da se to ne uradi

lalinea wrote:

Mór Thököly wrote:Jedino pametno. I kod nas treba svima preko 60 i kojima je proslo 4-5 meseci. Nikakvog razloga nema da se to ne uradi

sem manjka bilo kakvog istrazivanja na tu temu?

It's pretty impressive that vaccines directed to the ancestral strain spike from 2 years ago, w/ the virus that's evolved thru >290 million confirmed cases, and now to the hyper-mutated Omicron, have preserved efficacy of near 90% vs severe disease with a 3rd shot

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 2, 2022

Good point

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) January 2, 2022

Fourth Covid jab: We can’t vaccinate the planet every six months, says JCVI chief
Further inoculations should not be offered until there is more evidence, says Sir Andrew Pollard, with priority given to the most vulnerable
Fourth Covid jabs should not be offered until there is more evidence, the head of Britain's vaccine body has said - as he warned that giving boosters to people every six months was “not sustainable”.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, chairman of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said “we need to target the vulnerable” in future, rather than giving boosters to all over-12s.
Sir Andrew said there was no point in trying to stop all infections, and that “at some point, society has to open up”.
He also suggested that “misinformation” about the risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine - espoused by European leaders including Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, and Angela Merkel, former leader of Germany - was “highly likely” to have cost lives in Africa. (...)
Speaking to mark the first anniversary of the AstraZeneca jab rollout last January, Sir Andrew said: “The worst is absolutely behind us. We just need to get through the winter.”
He wants lockdowns to be consigned to history, adding: “At some point, society has to open up. When we do open, there will be a period with a bump in infections, which is why winter is probably not the best time.
“But that’s a decision for the policy makers, not the scientists. Our approach has to switch, to rely on the vaccines and the boosters. The greatest risk is still the unvaccinated.”
Booster vaccines should be targeted towards the vulnerable
Sir Andrew cautioned against blindly following Israel and Germany, which have given the green light to a second set of boosters to all over-60s.
“The future must be focusing on the vulnerable and making boosters or treatments available to them to protect them,” he said. 
“We know that people have strong antibodies for a few months after their third vaccination, but more data are needed to assess whether, when and how often those who are vulnerable will need additional doses.”
Vaccines can rapidly be adapted to fight new variants, but he said: “We can’t vaccinate the planet every four to six months. It’s not sustainable or affordable. In the future, we need to target the vulnerable.”
‘Misinformation risks people’s lives’
Sir Andrew left little doubt that he believed vaccine misinformation spread by Mr Macron and Mrs Merkel cost lives. The AstraZeneca vaccine was suspended in some countries because of concerns raised in France and Germany over its efficacy on the over-65s and the risk of blood clots.
Sir Andrew said: “Misinformation risks people’s lives. It’s highly likely that people became seriously ill and died because of vaccine misinformation.
“Some of this misinformation came intentionally from individuals against vaccinations, and others came from the unintentional effects of comments from politicians. Let’s just say that comments made in mainland Europe affected people in Africa.”