How to build better vaccines

OPINION:

As they say of innovation, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” What about a better vaccine? That’s a hinge question for our age, with millions of lives and billions of dollars in health care costs swinging on the answer.

Without question, vaccines have taken hits in the past few years, as the time-tested strategy of inoculating against illness has been tangled up in the toxicity of COVID-19 — not just the malady but also mask mandates, lockdowns and distrust.

Polls show the damage: A Kaiser Family Foundation survey conducted earlier this year finds increased public skepticism toward vaccines.

This is a choice people have a right to make, yet not being vaccinated can lead to disastrous consequences. For instance, the flu can kill, or sicken and debilitate.

Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention regards the flu vaccine as safe, its effectiveness is ragged. According to the CDC, in the past 15 years, vaccine effectiveness has never been higher than 60% and has been as low as 19%. No wonder fewer than half of American adults get flu shots.

Still, vaccines can work miracles if they improve and if they are taken. For instance, the polio vaccine is 99% to 100% effective. In 1952, a polio outbreak afflicted nearly 60,000 Americans, killing many and leaving most of the others hobbled or paralyzed.

Then, in 1955, came the polio vaccine. Today, for Americans and most other people around the world, the polio threat has been largely vanquished. The story of that vaccine has been one of continuous improvement. Tragic mistakes occurred early, yet within a few years, the safety problems were ironed out and an oral vaccine was developed.

Together, these innovations enabled rapid safeguarding of vulnerable populations.

Yet as we have seen, vaccines exist within a social as well as medical matrix. There’s always the threat of another pandemic, including the flu and other respiratory mass killers, yet in the meantime, we see ever-fluctuating cultural, political and financial concerns about vaccines.

The best way to deal with these concerns is not by hectoring people but by addressing their fears — by making vaccines safer as well as simpler and less costly to deliver.

In fact, on the vaccine horizon, there’s good news. A startup company in Massachusetts has a technology for a new kind of flu vaccine. It’s not a shot at all, just a nasal spray. A whiff, and that’s it.

The company, Vector Sciences, was founded by Dan Barouch, longtime director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In an interview, Dr. Barouch cites the philosophic and scientific principle of Occam’s razor: Look for the most direct and efficient solution to a problem. If most infectious diseases are spread through the air, Dr. Barouch says, the obvious way to block the infection is by delivering immunity to portals of entry in the nose and the lung.

Yet, Dr. Barouch continues, “The vaccine field is accustomed to giving intramuscular shots for most vaccines.” Such business-as-usual complacency regarding the method of delivery is understandable, yet from a public acceptance point of view, it’s undesirable.

To be sure, the idea of nasal spray vaccines is not new; many have tried it, albeit with limited success. Yet now Dr. Barouch’s company, Vector Sciences, believes it has built a better medical mousetrap. Its vaccine is inhaled and is more effective in a preclinical study.

Of course, these assertions will soon enough be scrutinized by the Food and Drug Administration. In the meantime, Dr. Barouch’s innovations remind us of the potency of scientific progress. These new findings point the way to more effective and broader uptake of better vaccines.

Notably, Dr. Barouch’s vaccine is stable in a warehouse; it requires no costly cold storage and contains no mercury or aluminum. It is made in the U.S. and is a vector vaccine, so it’s an alternative to mRNA vaccines.

Indeed, Dr. Barouch believes the vaccine and delivery technique he has developed can be extended to other illnesses — maybe even cancer.

In the meantime, we should keep in mind that the medical status quo is never good enough. There’s always room for improvement, hopefully, continuously. Questing minds bring innovation, which is how vaccines and all other medicines get easier, cheaper and, most important, better.

• James P. Pinkerton worked in the White House domestic policy offices of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.