# New COVID-19 Vaccine is Subpar | InvVax

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- Published at: 2024-02-08 18:43:55 UTC
- Updated at: 2025-07-18 07:06:39 UTC

## Author
Arthur Young

## Subject
InvVax

## Content
The news is out - this year's COVID-19 vaccine is just 54% effective: https://www.statnews.com/2024/02/01/updated-covid-vaccine-effectiveness/That puts it in the range of the annual flu shot, which averages 40% effectiveness, at times is as high as 60%, and sometimes is as low as 20%. What does that mean, from a mathematical standpoint? (As an aside, you might hear the word "effectiveness" on occasion and other times, "efficacy." The former is more a measure of natural world data, whereas the latter is generally data from a clinical trial.)Fifty-four percent effectiveness means that if 100 people out of 1,000 who did not receive the vaccine got COVID-19, 46 people out of 1,000 who received the vaccine got COVID-19. In other words, you have roughly half a chance of getting COVID-19 with the vaccine as without.That's really not very good. By way of comparison, the common childhood vaccines that nearly everyone gets, for example MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), are better than 99% effective. Meaning that if you got the MMR vaccine as a child you're pretty much for sure not going to get measles later in life.What's the reason for the subpar performance of the new COVID-19 vaccine? It likely boils down to either, or both, of two problems. One is that the vaccine is not inducing a strong immune response. The other is that there are circulating variants, whether one or many, which do not match the vaccine. The flu vaccine has both of these problems, thus its low effectiveness. My bet is that the COVID-19 vaccine is victim mostly of the latter explanation: the mRNA format is quite immunogenic (induces a strong immune response), whereas SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus) is constantly emerging as hundreds of different variants in nature.That's where InvVax comes in. When I was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, more than 10 years ago, I pioneered a new viral genetics platform, starting with flu virus. I made every possible DNA mutation in the entire viral genome, and then infected target cells with this mutant library, then took virus from the cells and infected a fresh set of target cells. I took the virus that came out of this second round and subjected it to next-generation sequencing. The final readout was a quantitative map of the effect of all these mutations. This started out as a basic science project. But I realized early on that this could be a great tool for vaccine discovery. The map essentially pinpointed the sequence regions where mutation was lethal to the virus. If we could incorporate those sequences into a vaccine, we could "box" the virus into a corner from which it could not escape by mutation. Mutants of these regions would constantly arise deep within your lung, but they would immediately perish. And thus you would never see viral escape from your flu vaccine.How do we account for the first problem, the lack of immunogenicity of the flu vaccine? We've taken a different approach from most: We're targeting T cells. This provides a different kind of immunity from the traditional antibody-based vaccines. We may potentially combine our T cell vaccine with a conventional antibody-based vaccine for a double layer of protection.We haven't yet started work on profiling the SARS-CoV-2 genome, as we're still trying to raise money for it. An investment on your part in Wefunder could make this research more feasible. But I hope you see the research rationale: Just as we did for flu, we'll find sequence regions where mutation is lethal to SARS-CoV-2. And then incorporate those "immutable" sequences into a T cell vaccine. And voilà, the virus can't mutate around our vaccine. Yes, hundreds of variants will crop up in the natural pool of billions of viruses. But you see, the key is that they won't be mutations within the regions that we've incorporated into our vaccine: they'll be everywhere else but there. So our COVID-19 vaccine, after our discovery work, will not be susceptible to the natural variants that the current COVID-19 vaccine is susceptible to.Make sense? Feel free to shoot me any questions in the comments section. And go get your COVID shot, if you haven't done so already! 54% effectiveness is better than nothing.Arthur Young