Analysis: our current shots could soon be updated to target new variants rather than the ancestral strain By Sheena Cruickshank, University of Manchester More than two years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, continues to challenge us.
Its ability to rapidly mutate has seen the evolution of increasingly infectious variants that are getting better at hiding from our immune response.
Vaccines are a huge achievement of modern-day science and have played a crucial role in reducing the very worst impacts of Covid.
But are the vaccines we currently have able to deal with the newest Covid variants? The current Covid vaccines are all based on the genetic building blocks, or the DNA sequence, of the original ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2.