NIH Scientist: ‘It’s Time to Get Really Serious’ About a Universal Coronavirus Vaccine 

After the emergence of several fatal coronaviruses over the past two decades, including the one at the center of the pandemic that has lasted almost two years now, federal scientists are discussing the need for “universal vaccines.” 

Dr. David Morens, senior advisor to ​​Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, published a commentary in The New England Journal of Medicine on December 15 along with Fauci and Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, NIAID senior investigator, titled “Universal Coronavirus Vaccines — An Urgent Need.” 

“It’s time to get really serious about it and try to develop vaccines that are ‘universal,’ meaning ideally if we were able to make these things with modern technology, they would be able to produce immunity to the viruses we have now, like SARS-CoV-2, but also against future viruses that have not emerged yet, but might in the future,” Morens told Government Executive. “We wrote this before it was clear that Omicron was going to spread like it is spreading…But if we had a truly universal vaccine, an ideally universal vaccine, we wouldn't have to worry about Omicron or any other new variant.”

Morens, a virologist and an epidemiologist, has been at NIAID since 1998 and before that worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Government Executive interviewed him on Tuesday about the new commentary. This interview has been edited lightly for length and clarity. 

GE: Can you summarize what this new commentary says? 

Morens: This article is kind of an almost philosophical statement of where we are and what needs to be done. We look at the landscape of coronaviruses including obviously SARS-CoV-2, the most important one right now, SARS-1 in the past—we had two outbreaks of that in 2002 and 2003—all the other related viruses that exist in bats all over the world, but predominantly in Southeast Asia and small parts of China and then of course the four endemic coronavirus that cause common cold…And we looked at all of that and basically said, you know, we've had three SARS-like virus emergences in the last 20 years, we've had [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome], which is a related virus. Now we’re in the middle of a pandemic and it’s getting worse and we’re having variants. So, this is now a big problem. This is not a little thing that we worry about and then goes away… Even if SARS-CoV-2 went away, which there’s no evidence it’s ever going to do that, it will probably be with us forever, but even if it did go away, there are many other related viruses, sarbecoviruses we call them, in bats, that seem poised to emerge in the future. Whenever that is, next year, five years from now. So this is kind of an existential threat for us human beings and our feeling is that it’s time to get really serious about it and try to develop vaccines that are “universal,” meaning ideally if we were able to make these things with modern technology, they would be able to produce immunity to the viruses we have now, like SARS-CoV-2, but also against future viruses that have not emerged yet, but might in the future. 

GE: In the article you talk about a “collaborative international effort” to develop these universal vaccines. I’m wondering what this means specifically for the National Institutes of Health and NIAID and what you’ll be doing to further this effort?

Morens: That remains to be seen. I don’t want to speak to what NIAID will be doing because we receive a budget from Congress and the budget is directed to certain things…What we were saying was not what the NIH is going to do or what is NIAID going to do? 

What we're really saying is what needs to be done internationally. And that has implications of course for us at NIH, but it also has implications for scientists and other countries that we would want to collaborate with, or that should be doing these things independently as part of an international team. I would hope that everybody including Congress would recognize the importance of these initiatives. Over the years Congress has been very generous and very supportive of NIH when there's a health emergency or a health crisis looming. So, I think that our government has been good to the federal agencies, to us NIH, and CDC and other agencies. And I don’t worry about that. But it's bigger than that. Even if we had all the funding we needed, new funding and existing funding, the problem can’t be solved by one country alone, and it can't be solved by one big budget alone. 

Agencies like NIH, our budgets are part of the picture, [but] a pandemic, by definition, is a global problem. It can't be solved locally; it has to be solved globally. So, the globe, the countries in the world, particularly those countries that are developed and have resources and have money and have trained scientists and experience in dealing with these things need to work together to solve the problem. And particularly right now the focus of the problem appears to be this collection of viruses that exist in bats, which are in all of the Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, and also small parts of southern and southwestern China. But we really don’t know much about them. 

A few teams have been doing some great work over the last 10 years to try to understand the nature of the problem, but we need a lot more work, partnering with the countries where the problems occurred. As I mentioned, the Southeast Asian countries and outside of Southeast Asia, we don't really have a good idea of what else exists there. MERS came from the Middle East; it didn't come from Southeast Asia. So, the size of the problem is unknown right now, where are these bad viruses? How threatening are they? What species are they in? What are the behaviors that might cause them to jump in human beings? These are things for which we have very little information, and we need to find out. 

GE: This article was published on December 15 and since then the highly contagious Omicron variant has surged. Can you talk about what this article means in context of how bad things are right now? 

Morens: Well, we wrote this before it was clear that Omicron was going to spread like it is spreading. So, I don't want to pretend that we envisioned this. I mean, we obviously knew, from over a month ago that Omicron was likely to do what it's doing now. But I don't want to imply that this publication is a comment that's specifically related to Omicron. But I think you know that.

But if we had a truly universal vaccine, an ideally universal vaccine, we wouldn't have to worry about Omicron or any other new variant because that vaccine would protect against it and the fact that we're in a situation now where we have to. But because of time and the nature of the situation, we have vaccines now, which are pretty good, but they're virus specific. They're really good against the virus that originally appeared in late 2019. Their ability to protect these newer variants is less and less. And you could predict that over time if Omicron does whatever it's going to do, and then another variant comes along, eventually, we'll have an escape from the immunity raised by the vaccines.

So having a virus specific vaccine, as opposed to a universal vaccine, is not the best long-term solution. And if I could clarify, this may be a little confusing, but when we think of a universal vaccine here’s what we think of: we think of viruses having other related viruses. It’s like what happens with the flu. You have a flu virus and then it mutates into other viruses and then you have five different viruses. And then it goes on and on like that. So, you know, there are virus variants. A universal vaccine would protect against not only the virus that was around when the vaccine was made, but variants of it and mutants of it will be around next month, and next year and the year after that so on. And we think that SARS-CoV-2 appears to be going down that road, just like flu does of mutating and developing new variants and a universal vaccine could ideally prevent the virus or at least limit the ability of the virus to mutate into new forms that would escape the vaccine. 

GE: Do you think this universal vaccine is how this particular pandemic ends? 

Morens: I have to give you more than one answer to that question. Number one is, you know, when we talk about a universal vaccine, it's universal in air quotes. It's not very likely that we have the technical ability to make a vaccine that's truly universal, that would prevent every coronavirus that has ever emerged that exists now and will ever emerge in the future forever and ever. It's not likely. 

So, a more realistic goal is a somewhat universal vaccine or a more universal vaccine than we have now. But that said, I think that if we're successful in developing such a vaccine, it's going to take years. This is not something that could happen really soon. And so, what’s going to happen with Omicron and potentially other variants, we don't know, but it'll happen despite whatever we do to make universal vaccines because it's like a foot race and the virus is the hare and the vaccine development capacity is the tortoise. By making vaccines, we're playing catch up, and we always do that. That's just the nature of the game. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't start, but we can't expect that universal vaccines are going to be around next year because it just takes longer than that. And there's a lot of technical development and probably lots of trial and error that needs to be done. It's a process that will take years.