We've never made a successful vaccine for a coronavirus before. This is why it's so difficult

17th April 2020

Last update:

29th January ‘23.

Professor Frazer was involved in the development of a vaccine against the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer.

Although Gardasil-9 and other HPV vaccines have suspected correlations with various adverse events he was spot on about this.

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Key excerpts:

"Just because we've got a really good vaccine against polio doesn't mean the same thing will work with coronavirus, because it's so different."

The challenge of respiratory infections

There are several reasons why our upper respiratory tract is a hard area to target a vaccine.

"It's a separate immune system, if you like, which isn't easily accessible by vaccine technology," Professor Frazer told the Health Report.

Despite your upper respiratory tract feeling very much like it's inside your body, it's effectively considered an external surface for the purposes of immunisation.

"It's a bit like trying to get a vaccine to kill a virus on the surface of your skin."

And if a vaccine elicits an immune response that misses the target cells, the result could potentially be worse than if no vaccine was given.

"One of the problems with corona vaccines in the past has been that when the immune response does cross over to where the virus-infected cells are it actually increases the pathology rather than reducing it," Professor Frazer said.

"So that immunisation with SARS corona vaccine caused, in animals, inflammation in the lungs which wouldn't otherwise have been there if the vaccine hadn't been given."

"Yes, you get antibodies after a [cold] infection, and yes it lasts for a while, but it's not lifelong... sort of months rather than years," he said.

"I think it would be fair to say that the natural immunity that you get after infection from this coronavirus is probably going to turn out like the coronaviruses we've seen in the past.

"I think it would be fair to say even if we get something which looked quite encouraging in animals, the safety trials in humans will have to be fairly extensive before we would think about vaccinating a group of people who have not yet been exposed to the virus.

"They might hope to get protection but certainly wouldn't be keen to accept a possibility of really serious side effects if they actually caught the virus."

More:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-vaccine-ian-frazer/12146616