Covid-19 vaccines: Development, strategies, types and vaccine usage hesitancy

ABSTRACT

Vaccine development using different platforms is one of the important strategies to address coronavirus disease pandemic. The global need for vaccines requires effective vaccine approaches and collaboration between pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies, governments and the industrial and academic sectors. About 72% of the vaccine candidates are being developed by the private sector, while 28% are carried out by the public sector and different non-profit organizations. COVID-19 vaccines are based on complete viruses (inactivated or attenuated), viral vectors (replicating or not), antigenic subunits (proteins or peptides), nucleic acids (RNA or DNA) or virus-like particles. Important aspects of vaccine development include manufacturing flexibility, speed, cost, safety, cellular and humoral immunogenicity, vaccine stability and cold chain maintenance. Vaccines can be prepared using different manufacturing platforms, computational biology, gene synthesis, structure-based antigen design and protein engineering. Individual confidence, convenience and complacency are factors that affect the attitude towards acceptance of COVID-19 vaccination. This could be complicated by socio-demographic, psychologic, cognitive and cultural factors. © 2021, Finlay Ediciones. All rights reserved.