5 January

This is the current Holy Grail for Covid, a nasal (mucosal) vaccine. The vaccines we have target the lower respiratory system, they don’t prevent the virus entering our noses in the first place. It’s much more difficult to create immunity at the entry point, not least because the nose is very close to the brain, so you need extreme caution with medicines targeted there. Hopefully this works, it’s 80% effective which is great. You don’t need to stop Covid to get rid of it, just slow it, exponential decay will do the rest. Though if we continue to not control spread of the virus, the virus will continue to evolve to evade all of our immune defences, whether from vaccination or infection. That leads to a very high probability of it then also evolving to an incredibly lethal variant, even for acute infection. And long-term chronic infection with any variant of Covid is exhibiting horrific long-term health impacts.