This new vaccine has been named CORBEVAX. It is based on tried and tested vaccine technology that has worked well before. Most, if not all, of the COVID-19 vaccines in use today can’t be made as easily as this one.
After moving to Houston, Texas, to work with Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, they came up with a vaccine candidate that could be made with protein subunit technology. This is the same technology that is used in the hepatitis B vaccine.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a new strain of coronavirus caused a lot of people to get sick. Hotez and Bottazzi thought they could use their old technology to fight COVID-19. They claim that the virus that causes COVID-19 and the virus that causes SARS very similar. Hotez says they tried to get government officials interested in their vaccine, but they did not have any success. People were so fixated on innovation that nobody thought, ‘Hey, maybe we could use a low-cost, durable, easy-breezy vaccine that can vaccinate the whole world,'” Hotez stated. He also claims that the vaccine would only cost $1.50 per dose.
Initial trials show that they were right to be sure that CORBEVAX would work.
An unpublished study in India that involved more than 3,000 people found that the vaccine was 90% effective in protecting against the original COVID-19 virus strain and 80% effective against the delta variant. Last month, regulators in India gave the vaccine permission to be used in an emergency.
An Indian vaccine company called Biological E Ltd is now making the vaccine, too. Another benefit of this vaccine is that the intellectual property will be free to use by anyone meaning that it will be easy to produce by poorer countries.
One problem with the CORBEVAX technology is that it can’t be changed as quickly as mRNA vaccines can to adapt to new strains of the virus. Hotez commented that ideally the vaccine would be both cheap to produce and be easy to change quickly. He mentioned that he is currently trying to develop the technology that would make this possible.
