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Nearly 4 years since the first messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines were developed, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus is evolving more quickly than tailored boosters can be made ready and continues to kill hundreds of Americans every week. There is a pressing need for more durable and lasting protection, but there is no “Operation Warp Speed” working to create new and better vaccines, only pandemic fatigue, experts said.

While existing vaccines remain one of the most important tools in combating severe disease and long COVID, research suggests that current protections wane significantly within 4-6 months. Scientists around the world have been trying to break new ground with the next generation of vaccines, but the unprecedented speed and collaboration with which those first mRNA shots were developed and made available to the public have not been replicated.

Critics point to a lack of urgency, national strategy and policy, and funding hampering progress. Overall spending on public health had already been decreasing for more than two decades, and funding for emergency preparedness programs has been cut again and again, according to Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public health policy organization.

“It's certainly disappointing, as someone who's still actively working on improving vaccines for respiratory pathogen,” said David Martinez, PhD, an assistant professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut. “There's no doubt in my mind, if we’re able to even devote half of the resources that we did for something like Operation Warp Speed—and resources and personnel and funding—then we could certainly achieve something great in the form of more quickly being able to develop these next-generation booster vaccines."

“The virus is still evolving, and it's still causing hospitalization and death. It's causing long COVID. So, we’re still going to need that investment,” said Sabrina Assoumou, MD, MPH, an infectious disease physician at Boston Medical Center, Boston. Head over to Medscape to read the full story.