Get ready for your 'COVID nasal booster'

“Are sprays the future of COVID-19 vaccines?” asks Nature this week, announcing an inhaler version of a Chinese COVID vaccine, one of “more than 100 oral or nasal vaccines in development around the world.” Unlike the COVID vaccines we already have, these oral/nasal sprays hold the promise of achieving sterilizing immunity, preventing people from falling even mildly ill with COVID and also from transmitting it to others.

“The COVID-19 vaccines currently in use do a good job of reducing disease severity and preventing hospitalization,” the Nature article continues, “but don’t block mild illness or transmission that well.” This isn’t news; it’s been known for over a year that COVID vaccines aren’t really vaccines at all in the traditional sense of providing immunity from disease, leading many to pivot and claim that they were never meant to do anything of the sort. That said, why should it matter? Is it worth investing millions, if not billions, in order to save people from getting or passing on a COVID cold?

There seem to be two main hypotheses that justify this research. One is that researchers are worried about people who for whatever valid reason cannot be “vaccinated” against COVID with any of the existing intramuscular shots, and want to protect them from contracting COVID. The other is that the existing shots aren’t as protective against serious disease and death as pharma and governments claim. Nature doesn’t speculate on the reasons why it’s worth developing a mucosal vaccine, and merely suggests that it “might help to quash SARS-CoV-2.”

Nature also notes that there exist mucosal vaccines for other diseases too, including polio and influenza. The oral polio vaccine is described as “highly successful,” coming close to achieving “sterilizing immunity” – although “in rare cases . . . this live attenuated vaccine will mutate and cause illness.” The illness referred to is polio itself and it can be fatal. The influenza mucosal vaccine is apparently less of a hit, with one product of a Swiss pharma company having been withdrawn after it was discovered that it “increased the risk of temporary facial paralysis.” Moreover, influenza spray vaccines have been found to be less effective in adults. It is surmised that this is because “adults’ mucosal immune responses might ... clear [the virus in the vaccine] before it has a chance to do its job.”

This consideration would presumably apply to COVID mucosal vaccines too, as the vast majority of the world’s population already has some kind of immunity to COVID. But what kind of immunity do people have, and does it matter?

A study in Science Immunology (July 19, 2022) set out to answer this question. It compared the bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BAL) and blood in three groups of people: unvaccinated healthy donors, COVID-19 vaccinated individuals, and recovered hospitalized patients.

“Our results demonstrated that robust mucosal humoral and cellular immune responses were elicited in the lungs by natural infection and mRNA vaccination plus adenovirus-mediated vaccination, but not by mRNA vaccination alone,” the authors write.

Furthermore, although the mRNA vaccinated cohort had “comparable neutralizing antibody levels as COVID-19 convalescents,” they “generated considerably lower mucosal IgA and neutralizing antibody responses against SARS-CoV-2 D614G, Delta and Omicron BA.1.1 variants than those of convalescents.”

The authors stress that “we provide compelling real-world evidence that mRNA vaccination does not induce notable lung tissue-residing S-specific memory B and T cells.” The significance of this, they write, is that the lower respiratory tracts of COVID-naïve people who have been vaccinated against COVID are still vulnerable to infection. The authors note that “prevention of severe disease after infection is conferred mainly by memory T and B cells,” although they add that their data “do not dispute the notion that current vaccines are highly effective in preventing hospitalization and death.”

Their conclusion is that “a mucosal SARS-CoV-2 booster vaccine may be necessary to achieve more robust immunity and protection from re-infection by future variants” and that this booster should be an based on adenovirus delivery. What they don’t conclude is that the intramuscular COVID “vaccines” have failed.