It sucks that we’re unlikely to get a vaccine targeting a difficult to change part of the virus by the established mRNA makers. We would probably need a new entity to do it.
I don’t know whether they even had any data on change difficulty. I think it was more like - we needed a vaccine yesterday and Moderna and BioNTech had the mRNA technology just ready to be able to spin up a vaccine quickly. And that was good enough to save a lot of people from severe disease.
They definitely had something, I remember reading about it at the time. it might have involved what they knew about previous coronavirus’s as well. Whatever they had though it ended up being wrong.
Yes, they’ve been updating the vaccine every year to match currently-circulating virus strains. This is about an additional update coming out this fall.
Pretty much the same thing is done with flu vaccines, where you need a periodic update for it to be effective.
Scientists look at the historical peaks from the last years, then they work back from that targeted date by adding in the many months needed to do trials, manufacturing, etc. Good thing is that, with mRNA technology, that time window is actually much better that it used to be for the older tech we’ve used for flu viruses in the past.
It’s never going to be perfect, but as long as you had last year’s booster, as the article mentioned, you’re much less likely to get seriously ill.
Predicting when next year’s peaks will drop is like predicting next years rainfall. You can get close, but it’s never going to be perfect. (Not the greatest analogy, since rain doesn’t mutate, and umbrellas don’t require months of human trials. Ohh well)
These are smart people working on this stuff. If they could have had an updated vaccine ready to go for any unexpected peak, they would.