GENEVA (dpa-AFX) – According to international experts, the ongoing adaptation of corona vaccines should avoid the original virus and target the currently dominant virus strains. This was announced by the vaccination advisory committee of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Thursday in Geneva.
The vaccines on the market prevented serious illnesses, but the protection against normal corona symptoms was “limited and less permanent”, the panel found. “Covid-19 vaccines with new compositions are needed to improve protection against symptomatic courses of the disease,” the WHO advisers demanded.
Virus strains of the XBB.1 type are currently the most widespread worldwide. They are descended from the omicron variant of the coronavirus. Therefore, the panel recommended using one of the XBB.1 derivatives as an antigen to elicit the necessary response from the human immune system.
Some of the currently approved vaccines still contain the version of the virus that was identified at the beginning of the pandemic. However, the WHO committee pointed out that this “index virus” no longer plays a role in the current infection process and is hardly effective against XBB strains. Therefore it should disappear from future vaccination recipes, it said./al/DP/ngu