Covid shots do an admirable job of boosting our immune response enough to protect against serious illness, but they don’t boost immunity in the one spot we’d like them to: our airways. That’s why researchers have been working on vaccines you breathe into your lungs or spray into your nose. The idea is that these vaccines will elicit an immune response in the mucous membranes of your respiratory tract that might help stave off infection or, if you do become infected, make you less likely to transmit the virus.
These “mucosal” covid vaccines aren’t available in the US or Europe, but they are in other parts of the world. When we last reported on efforts to develop a mucosal vaccine in 2022, two had been approved in China and India. Now five are in use in China, India, Iran, Indonesia, Morocco, and Russia. A couple dozen more candidates are in clinical trials. And many, many more are on the way.
The federal government is working to speed things along with an injection of cash through Project NextGen, a $5 billion effort to usher new and improved covid vaccines to market. In October, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that nearly $20 million would go to two companies developing mucosal vaccines—Codagenix and CastleVax. That money will help the companies gear up for studies to test how well their vaccines work to prevent symptomatic infections.
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