U.S. to spend $5 billion to speed up development of new COVID vaccines

“It’s been very clear to us that the market on this is moving very slowly,” Ashish Jha, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said Monday. “There’s a lot that government can do, the administration can do, to speed up those tools … for the American people.”

Jha and others said the new effort will focus on three goals: creating long-lasting monoclonal antibodies, after an evolving virus rendered current treatments ineffective; accelerating development of vaccines that produce mucosal immunity, which is thought to reduce transmission and infection risks; and speeding efforts to develop pan-coronavirus vaccines to guard against new SARS-CoV-2 variants, as well as other coronaviruses.

Officials note that several coronavirus-driven outbreaks in the last two decades, including severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus in 2002, and Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012, have spurred worries about the potential for future health crises related to the viruses. That said, a universal coronavirus vaccine could take years to develop; researchers have sought unsuccessfully for decades to create such a vaccine against influenza.

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