Will there be a vaccine against all the Covid variants anytime soon? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Mid-pandemic, studies suggested that a single vaccine known as a pan vaccine would soon be developed that would cover all the variants of Covid-19. Clearly that hasn’t happened yet, and Anna Durbin, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins, says the reason has to do with which part of our immune response is activated by a vaccine.

Durbin: We have the antibody response and then we have something called the T cell response which helps clear virus. The parts of the virus that really are more conserved across different families generally those stimulate the T cell response a little bit better. When we’re thinking pan vaccines those targets are a little bit better but the problem with T cell targeted vaccines is they don’t prevent infection because your T cells are only stimulated after you’re infected. They do prevent severe disease and they do clear virus once it gets into the system.  :33

Durbin says stay tuned as this is a very dynamic situation. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.