MeowZedong

One of the major hurdles with the COVID mRNA vaccines right now isn’t efficacy, but longevity. Insurance companies and governments pretend they last 6 to 12 months, but they really fall off around 3 to 4 months. Improving this is an active area of research, but we should be accounting for this in vaccination schedules.

In short, you should be getting the shot more frequently than you probably are.

The other hurdles are mostly political, but for those still worried about reactogenicity, the main cause is usually impurities in the mRNA and is relatively easy to overcome.

From the perspective of vaccine research, mRNA therapeutics hold lots of potential for innovation and shortening/reducing costs in the development cycle. I doubt subunit vaccines are going away anytime soon, but mRNA is definitely changing the way we approach ideas about antigens, adjuvants, and drug delivery in general.

Why spend all the time and money developing and getting approval for each component in a vaccine when you can program mRNA that will get the body to produce a vaccine for you?