Amid President Joe Biden’s Monday signing of a bill that ends the COVID-19 national emergency in the U.S., his administration is launching a $5 billion-plus program to accelerate the development of new coronavirus vaccines and treatments, The Washington Post (WaPo) reports.
Biden’s “Project Next Gen” will follow President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” which sped up the usually-lengthy vaccine development process to produce the COVID vaccine.
Project Next Gen will “take a similar approach to partnering with private-sector companies to expedite development of vaccines and therapies,” according to WaPo. “Scientists, public heath experts and politicians have called for the initiative, warning that existing therapies have steadily lost their effectiveness and that new ones are needed.”
Dawn O’Connell, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, stated that certain lab work has already commenced and that the government has initiated actions to locate potential private-sector collaborators.
“We’ve begun surveying the landscape out there,” O’Connell said. “Assessing what vaccine candidates are available, [and] moving through what exciting technologies are there.”
Goals set by the project include “creating long-lasting monoclonal antibodies,” “accelerating development of vaccines that produce mucosal immunity,” and “speeding efforts to develop pan-coronavirus vaccines to guard against new SARS-CoV-2 variants,” as well as other coronaviruses.
A pan-coronavirus jab is a “universal coronavirus vaccine” that in theory protects against all variants of the virus.
However, such technology “could take years to develop,” WaPo notes, raising questions about how the U.S. government intends to navigate the potential concerns surrounding its push to vaccinate Americans against COVID and the public’s varying levels of willingness to receive the vaccine.
These questions are based on concerns about government overreach and the potential infringement of individual freedoms and liberties.
The $5 billion in funding came after the White House directed Health and Human Services (HHS) to free up the money for the endeavor.
The push for new COVID vaccines comes despite peer-reviewed research published in February in The Lancet confirming that natural immunity acquired from a previous coronavirus infection can provide better protection against severe illness and death than vaccines, which pose their own health risks.
As of March 31, the COVID vaccine has been linked to 196,067 hospitalizations, 1,541,274 injuries, and 35,048 deaths.
The study authors said their analysis of the available data “suggests that the level of protection afforded by previous infection is at least as high, if not higher than that provided by two-dose vaccination using high-quality mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech).”
Given concerns over the potential health risks associated with COVID vaccines and growing evidence suggesting natural immunity provides superior protection, it remains unclear why the U.S. government is heavily promoting vaccination while neglecting to investigate and promote natural immunity as a viable alternative.
