Studies suggest that self-disseminating vaccines could prevent the “spillover” of animal viruses into humans as pandemic diseases. But what if we could prevent the next pandemic by stopping its spread in animals before it jumped to us? Could this be achieved with vaccines that spread through a wild population on their own? Some scientists think so. Scientists have proposed creating self-disseminating vaccines that would naturally spread in wild populations. Nuismer and Bull discussed two kinds: transferable vaccines and transmissible ones. A transferable vaccine can be given to a bat, for example, as a paste on its fur. Upon the animal’s return to its colony, other bats would groom it and get exposed to the vaccine too. The spread of this type of vaccine would be limited, but in Nuismer and Bull’s models, transferable vaccines could achieve high enough levels of immunization to potentially eradicate pathogens in wild populations. The second type of self-disseminating vaccine, the transmissible one, consists of live modified viruses that propagate a weakened form of a disease. They would be ideal for large wild populations because even just a few individual animals vaccinated with them could spread immunity widely.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/can-vaccines-for-wildlife-prevent-human-pandemics-20200824
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