Regular booster vaccines against the novel coronavirus will be needed because of mutations that make it more transmissible and better able to evade human immunity, the head of Britain's effort to sequence the virus's genomes told Reuters.
The novel coronavirus, which has killed 2.65 million people globally since it emerged in China in late 2019, mutates around once every two weeks, slower than influenza or HIV, but enough to require tweaks to vaccines.
Sharon Peacock, who heads COVID-19 Genomics U.K. (COG-U.K.) which has sequenced nearly half of all the novel coronavirus genomes so far mapped globally, said international cooperation was needed in the "cat and mouse" battle with the virus.