Comment in 2021

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Here, John Kelton and colleagues provide an overview of vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT), a very rare complication that has been observed following vaccination with adenoviral vector-based COVID-19 vaccines.

Muhammad Suleman Rana and colleagues from the National Institute of Health in Pakistan discuss the urgent need to implement catch-up vaccination programmes for measles and polio to prevent resurgence of these deadly diseases.

This Comment article proposes that T cell-oriented vaccine strategies should be considered to control the COVID-19 pandemic in the longer term, given declining levels of neutralizing antibodies with time after vaccination or infection and the emergence of viral escape variants.

It took roughly 1 year for a COVID-19 vaccine to become available, yet, four decades after the first patient with HIV was described, we do not yet have a vaccine for HIV. Here, Barton Haynes examines the biological reasons why vaccine development for HIV is so exceptionally challenging.

In this Comment article, Sofonias Tessema and John Nkengasong provide an overview of the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa and the challenges posed by the triple burden of emerging, endemic and non-communicable diseases.

This Comment discusses how the emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern could impact on the hopes of long-term pandemic control through vaccination and the mutations that might be relevant to the design of modified vaccines.

The identification of elevated IL-6 levels in patients with severe COVID-19 led to the rapid development of clinical trials targeting this cytokine. Overall, these trials do not support the widespread use of IL-6 antagonists in hospitalized patients with mild-to-moderate disease, but IL-6 antagonists may be beneficial when rapidly deployed in patients with severe COVID-19, as we discuss here.

Preliminary data from Israel demonstrate real-life effectiveness of their COVID-19 vaccination campaign and provide insights that could inform rollout in other countries.

This Comment outlines how the recently licensed vaccines for COVID-19 activate innate immune mechanisms to promote immune memory to SARS-CoV-2. The authors also consider future challenges that could limit vaccine efficacy.

Reassuring data from accidental pregnancies that have occurred in the clinical trials of approved COVID-19 vaccines indicate that vaccination does not harm fertility or increase the rate of miscarriage.

The COVID-19 pandemic has stressed the importance of understanding species such as bats that can serve as reservoirs for emerging viral threats. Here, Wang and colleagues call for greater consensus among the bat immunology community in five key areas.

Somewhat surprisingly, individuals with asthma do not seem to have a greater risk of developing severe COVID-19. Here, the authors offer mechanistic insights to explain the epidemiological data.

Here, Veldhoen and Simas discuss why immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in populations may ultimately be driven by the endemic presence of the virus and not rely on continued mass vaccination programmes.