SOTA: COVID-19 Vaccines: Successes, Lessons Learned, Opportunities and Bottlenecks

COVID and the causative agent, SARS-CoV-2, were first identified in early 2020. The first COVID vaccine approval took 364 days from discovery to authorization in 2020, which is a record, and shows our abilities to develop vaccines in times of public health emergencies. We have come a long way in a very short period of time with, to date, 33 COVID vaccines either authorized or licensed around the world using a variety of platform technologies. There have been many lessons leant about the complexities of the vaccine development pathway, in particular the bottlenecks associated with manufacturing that had not been anticipated at the beginning of the pandemic. Nonetheless, rapid advances in vaccine technology offer many opportunities for applications against many human and veterinary diseases. It is clear that SARS-CoV-2 will not be the last emerging virus to become a pandemic threat, and it is likely that we will see at least one more pandemic threat in the foreseeable future, which is likely to have a zoonotic origin. In 2022, the big research goal has become pandemic preparedness and many funding organizations are looking to support research to make the world prepared for either a public health or veterinary pandemic. As such, the One Health initiative is becoming increasingly important.