Multivariant vaccines are a hopeful candidate in our ongoing fight against coronavirus and the many variants clouding recovery. While we are currently facing threats from the Delta variant, there could be possibilities that we face newer, more deadlier variants as well, including the Mu variant, which has been said to completely surpass vaccine-driven antibodies. In such a scenario, while we hope for COVID-19 to turn into a routine-flu like disease, scientists predict that multivariant defeating jabs are the only way to get over the pandemic.

For starters, multivariant jabs are designed in a similar manner to target core spike protein of the novel coronavirus, which is used by the virus to latch onto the body’s cells and cause an attack. While variants are known to escape the vaccine-immunity and bring about changes in the spike protein structures, multivariant shots go one step further, and also work against non-spike proteins. Some of the vaccines also train the immune systems by flashing key genetic information associated with the pathogen, to help identify and fight the virus, and assay variants which may pose danger.

Some of the vaccine technologies, such as the SaRNA vaccines, much like mRNA vaccines do not contain actual fragments of the virus, but carry genetic instructions to identify and launch an attack against the virus.

Flu vaccines are the only currently used multivariant vaccines being used to launch tolerable immune responses against different flu strains.