Chickens and chimps. Measles and mumps.
Although at first glance they appear to have nothing to do with COVID-19, they all play a role in ongoing efforts to build better vaccines against the disease.
In a perfect world, these vaccines would provide long-lasting defense against even mild illness, minimize spread, and be cheap and easy to store and administer. Three years after they first became available, messenger RNA (mRNA) COVID-19 vaccines “are still difficult to buy for low- and middle-income countries,” microbiologist Peter Palese, PhD, of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told JAMA in an interview.