From nasal vaccines to pills: the next defences against Covid

A company called Vaxart has developed an oral tablet that showed promising results in a small trial last month. Photograph: Tanja Ivanova/Getty Images

When the autumn booster programme begins next month, many people are likely to receive Moderna’s new bivalent vaccine, designed to protect against the original Covid strain and the more transmissible Omicron variant. As Covid continues to evolve, so will vaccination strategies. Here we look at some of the developments in the pipeline.

Variant-specific boosters