Opinion: A new Lyme disease vaccine can’t arrive soon enough
By Nathan Gilles. May 14, 2026. Columbia Insight
In the summer of 2007, I took a walk with my dad on the Appalachian Trail near my parents’ home in upstate New York. Two days later, I developed a rash on my left arm in the shape of a bull’s-eye.
The rash was a telltale sign that I had been infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria responsible for causing Lyme disease.
In March, Pfizer published the results of its clinical trials for the company’s new Lyme disease vaccine.
Transmitted to humans by ticks, roughly 89,000 cases of Lyme disease were reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2023. The disease, however, is easy to misdiagnose and hard to test for. According to the health agency, the actual number of infected individuals could be closer to half a million annually.
If Pfizer’s vaccine is approved by the FDA, it will be the first vaccine for Lyme disease since SmithKline Beecham released its Lyme vaccine in 1998, only to pull it a few years later due to a lack of sales tied to unsubstantiated safety concerns.
Having a Lyme vaccine again will no doubt help hundreds of thousands if not millions of people enjoy spending time in the natural world while also avoiding contracting what for many can be a debilitating illness if left untreated for too long.
Pfizer’s vaccine is designed to target B. burgdorferi infections. What the vaccine won’t do, however, is stop other disease-causing microbes carried by ticks from infecting us. We also need vaccines to stop these microbes.
What many doctors now recognize but the public largely doesn’t, is that ticks carry multiple disease-causing microbes, including bacteria, viruses and blood parasites.
Nathan Gilles 