TAMPA, Fla. – COVID-19 vaccines will likely be with us for the foreseeable future as new variants emerge and vaccination efforts continue worldwide. That's according to University of South Florida professor Dr. Michael Teng.

"There are 7.5 billion people on this planet, and we will, maybe by the end of this year, have vaccinated less than a billion," said Teng, an associate professor with USF's College of Medicine.

That will leave billions still at risk of being infected by the virus.

Teng said it's unclear at this point how long immunity from the vaccines will last. An added challenge could be variants, like those first identified in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Brazil, that may decrease effectiveness of existing vaccines.

“At least for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to be able to have vaccines that respond to new variants that come up. We’re lucky — the mRNA vaccines seem to be pretty easy to change," said Teng, referring to the technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

The rollout of the vaccine has been frustrating at times for those trying to book appointments. Registration portals have crashed and hundreds of appointments seem to vanish as soon as they become available. Teng said if people do need to get vaccinated a second time, possible increased supply could help to ease frustrations.

“Some of these problems that we’re having with these vaccine portals, with the vaccination sites, is that, you know, we’re doing this in real time. We are trying to manufacture billions of doses of vaccine, which we don’t have, and we’re trying to inoculate a whole bunch of people all at the same time because it’s a pandemic and there’s a real urgency to get this done quickly," said Teng. “These are technologies that could be used for a number of different other vaccines, as well, so it makes sense for them to build out this production capacity. So, I don’t think we’ll see the same limited supply of vaccines in the future.”