“The role of” anti-Covid “vaccines was fundamental and indisputable”. In 3 years of the pandemic, in which we have changed and Sars-CoV-2 has changed, their function has also evolved. Today, in the Omicron era, “spray vaccines could be decisive”. The virologist underlines this to time.news Salute Robert Burioniauthor with Renata Gili, a specialist in public health, of an article published in the journal ‘Journal of Translational Medicine’, in which the evolution of Sars-CoV-2 is photographed with the advent of its longest-lived variant.
Experts also talk about vaccines and reiterate: “The data collected in recent years undoubtedly demonstrate their great effectiveness and extreme safety”. But with Omicron, explains Burioni, professor of the Faculty of Medicine of the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, “even in the case of vaccines there are some differences: before Omicron, in fact, the effectiveness of vaccination was also high in the hinder infections and the transmission of contagion, an effectiveness that has decreased with this variant.But this does not mean that i vaccines they don’t work. On the contrary: they continue to work very well because they prevent severe forms of Covid, avoiding hospitalizations and deaths. And that doesn’t seem like much to me.”
What is happening is that, “by analyzing all the evolutionary characteristics of the Omicron variant, it really seems that the virus is progressively evolving towards a form that causes increasingly localized infections, for example in the nose or throat”, Burioni and Gili highlight.
The article goes into even more detail: with Omicron, the authors explain, “perhaps the absence of IgA, necessary for protection at the level of the mucous membranes against localized viral infections, also comes into play”. IgA (immunoglobulin type A) are antibodies that defend the mucous membranes. Could the development of vaccines to be administered by nose and by mouth be a key against today’s Sars-CoV-2? “Of course – replies Burioni – spray vaccines could be decisive in providing IgA-mediated protection, essential for the defense against viruses that give ‘localized’ infections, such as influenza”.