When it Comes to COVID-19 Vaccines, More Is Better
At the time of writing this piece, Canada has four COVID-19 vaccines approved for emergency use:
- BioNTech/Pfizer – COMIRNATY® (which uses the Acuitas Therapeutics lipid nanoparticle delivery system)
- Moderna – mRNA-1273
- AstraZeneca – COVISHIELD
- Johnson & Johnson – Janssen
People often ask why there are multiple vaccines being administered and why others are still in the development or clinical study phase – and those are good questions. For the COVID-19 global pandemic, it really is a case of the more vaccines available, the better.
With multiple organizations developing and manufacturing vaccines, this means that the distribution throughout Canada and the world can be done more quickly. For the global pandemic to end and COVID-19 to be under control, it is important to ensure that everyone has access to a vaccine. This deadly and destructive virus doesn’t recognize borders. We need to see the world as one big community – and the more vaccines that are developed, produced, distributed and administered, the better off we all are.
While each vaccine that has been approved for emergency use has been shown to be both safe and effective, there are different requirements for storage and transport. For some, you only need one dose, which is helpful in providing the ability to vaccinate in rural or remote communities. The more vaccines that are developed, the more opportunity to reach every person in the world, no matter where they live.
Gavi.org (The Vaccine Alliance) has a good article from December 2020 on why it’s important to have many COVID-19 vaccines developed and approved for use. You can read it here.
Quite often, members of the Acuitas Therapeutics team are asked about the vaccines we didn’t help to develop and if we see them as “competitors.” We don’t. We are grateful for every single COVID-19 vaccine that has been and will be developed. This is a global team effort and we are honoured to play a role in it. We are also asked about which vaccine to get, if there is a choice. Our answer is: The best COVID-19 vaccine to get is the one available to you. Each one of these vaccines is safe and effective. What is important is getting a vaccine, not which one it is.
