While the fierce debate about whether to vax or not rages on, scientists and epidemiologists are feverishly working on ways to deliver COVID-19 vaccines more safely and with less hassle.

The New York Times has brought interesting news out of the centuries-old Indian city of Hyderabad, where the modern laboratories of Bharat Biotech are reportedly churning out a COVID-19 vaccine that would be sprayed into the nose rather than injected into the arm.

Nasal vaccines may be the best way to prevent infections long term, because they provide protection exactly where it is needed to fend off the virus — the mucosal linings of the airways, where the novel coronavirus first lands, the newspaper said.

The prevailing view is that if such a vaccine progresses to the point of approval by key organisations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it could turn the tide against the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The likelihood is high, because Bharat Biotech is among the world’s leading vaccine manufacturers, its best known product, Covaxin, having been authorised to prevent COVID-19 in India and many other countries. But its experimental nasal vaccine may prove to be the real game-changer.

According to the manufacturers, immunising entire populations with a nasal or oral vaccine would be faster in the middle of a surge than injections which require skill and time to administer. It said a nasal vaccine is likely to be more palatable to many, including children, than painful shots, and would circumvent shortages of needles, syringes, and other materials.

There are at least a dozen other nasal vaccines in development worldwide, some of them now in Phase 3 trials, The New York Times reported, noting that Bharat Biotech’s may be the first to become available.

In January, the company won approval to begin a Phase 3 trial of the nasal spray in India as a booster for people who have already received two shots of a COVID-19 vaccine. Hope is being driven by the fear that the Omicron variant has shown that even three doses of a vaccine might not prevent infection.

Nasal sprays also seem to address the fuss over natural immunity. Stanford University immunologist Dr Michal Tal makes the following argument, which we think is compelling:

“People who gain immunity because of an infection with the virus — rather than from an injected vaccine — tend to have strong mucosal immunity, at least for a while. That may help explain why they seemed to fare better against the Delta variant than those who had been vaccinated.

“The way to get people that kind of mucosal protection really, really, really should be with a nasal vaccine,” Dr Tal said.

Moreover, nasal vaccines are the only way to really circumvent person-to-person transmission, according to Dr Jennifer Gommerman, an immunologist at the University of Toronto. “We can’t live forever sheltering vulnerable people and boosting them so that their antibody levels stay artificially high,” she insists.

The development of nasal sprays could bring a quick end to the tug of war among Jamaicans over how far to go with restrictions to control the virus. Indeed, we might be able to get rid altogether of restrictions, as so many other countries are trying to do now.