RNA vaccines: a suitable platform for tackling emerging pandemics?

The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the ongoing threat of pandemics caused by novel, previously unrecognized, or mutated pathogens with high transmissibility. Currently, vaccine development is too slow for vaccines to be used in the control of emerging pandemics. RNA-based vaccines might be suitable to meet this challenge. The use of an RNA-based delivery mechanism promises fast vaccine development, clinical approval, and production. The simplicity of in vitro transcription of mRNA suggests potential for fast, scalable, and low-cost manufacture. RNA vaccines are safe in theory and have shown acceptable tolerability in first clinical trials. Immunogenicity of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines in phase 1 trials looks promising, however induction of cellular immunity needs to be confirmed and optimized. Further optimization of RNA vaccine modification and formulation to this end is needed, which may also enable single injection regimens to be achievable. Self-amplifying RNA vaccines, which show high immunogenicity at low doses, might help to improve potency while keeping manufacturing costs low and speed high. With theoretical properties of RNA vaccines looking promising, their clinical efficacy is the key remaining question with regard to their suitability for tackling emerging pandemics. This question might be answered by ongoing efficacy trials of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines

A dataset of non-pharmaceutical interventions on SARS-CoV-2 in Europe

During the second half of 2020, many European governments responded to the resurging transmission of SARS-CoV-2 with wide-ranging non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). These efforts were often highly targeted at the regional level and included fine-grained NPIs. This paper describes a new dataset designed for the accurate recording of NPIs in Europe's second wave to allow precise modelling of NPI effectiveness. The dataset includes interventions from 114 regions in 7 European countries during the period from the 1st August 2020 to the 9th January 2021. The paper includes NPI definitions tailored to the second wave following an exploratory data collection. Each entry has been extensively validated by semi-independent double entry, comparison with existing datasets, and, when necessary, discussion with local epidemiologists. The dataset has considerable potential for use in disentangling the effectiveness of NPIs and comparing the impact of interventions across different phases of the pandemic

Understanding the effectiveness of government interventions against the resurgence of COVID-19 in Europe

European governments use non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to control resurging waves of COVID-19. However, they only have outdated estimates for how effective individual NPIs were in the first wave. We estimate the effectiveness of 17 NPIs in Europe’s second wave from subnational case and death data by introducing a flexible hierarchical Bayesian transmission model and collecting the largest dataset of NPI implementation dates across Europe. Business closures, educational institution closures, and gathering bans reduced transmission, but reduced it less than they did in the first wave. This difference is likely due to organisational safety measures and individual protective behaviours—such as distancing—which made various areas of public life safer and thereby reduced the effect of closing them. Specifically, we find smaller effects for closing educational institutions, suggesting that stringent safety measures made schools safer compared to the first wave. Second-wave estimates outperform previous estimates at predicting transmission in Europe’s third wave