A Systematic Review on COVID-19 Vaccine Strategies, Their Effectiveness, and Issues

COVID-19 vaccines are indispensable, with the number of cases and mortality still rising, and currently no medicines are routinely available for reducing morbidity and mortality, apart from dexamethasone, although others are being trialed and launched. To date, only a limited number of vaccines have been given emergency use authorization by the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency. There is a need to systematically review the existing vaccine candidates and investigate their safety, efficacy, immunogenicity, unwanted events, and limitations. The review was undertaken by searching online databases, i.e., Google Scholar, PubMed, and ScienceDirect, with finally 59 studies selected. Our findings showed several types of vaccine candidates with different strategies against SARS-CoV-2, including inactivated, mRNA-based, recombinant, and nanoparticle-based vaccines, are being developed and launched. We have compared these vaccines in terms of their efficacy, side effects, and seroconversion based on data reported in the literature. We found mRNA vaccines appeared to have better efficacy, and inactivated ones had fewer side effects and similar seroconversion in all types of vaccines. Overall, global variant surveillance and systematic tweaking of vaccines, coupled with the evaluation and administering vaccines with the same or different technology in successive doses along with homologous and heterologous prime-booster strategy, have become essential to impede the pandemic. Their effectiveness appreciably outweighs any concerns with any adverse events.