HACKER Q&A
📣 champagnepapi

Why are people certain a vaccine with be found for Coronavirus?


I am pretty ignorant on the topic, so please go light. I'm asking because there are viruses such as HIV that still have no vaccine, so why are people so sure that they will find/create one for Corona anytime soon?


  👤 jjk166 Accepted Answer ✓
Significant progress was made towards vaccines for other diseases closely related to Coronavirus such as SARS and MERS before funding dried up. While a SARS vaccine probably wouldn't be effective against Covid-19, there's no reason a priori to assume covid-19 has some special quality that makes it substantially more difficult to develop a vaccine for.

HIV resists attempts to produce a vaccine because of its high mutation rate. There are too many strains out there for one vaccine to ever be effective and no guarantee that new strains won't pop up. Had HIV been caught and contained early on, a vaccine cocktail could probably have been developed that would be effective, but now you'd still have to worry about any HIV positive person having a strain you are not vaccinated against and thus would have to take the same protective measures.

Covid-19 has been mutating slowly thus far, so there is good reason to believe that if a vaccine is developed, it would be effective. It is possible and even probable that covid will remain endemic in some regions, particularly those with poor healthcare systems, and thus new strains will have time to emerge. We thus may need new vaccines for seasonal strains, similar to the flu, but still it will be much more manageable.

At the end of the day though, a vaccine may not be necessary for life to go back to something close to normal. The US already has about 1.3 million community spread pneumonia cases per year on average which has a substantially higher mortality rate and we get along just fine. The issue with Covid was that we were unprepared for it - hospitals did not have adequate amounts of supplies and equipment to handle the sudden spike in admitted patients. This leads to worse outcomes for those who catch the disease and extreme measures to limit the rate the disease spreads. If all the hospitals already had tons of extra ventilators lying around and if everyone already had face masks at home and if businesses already had adequate plans for sick leave in place then this outbreak would have been a mild inconvenience. While we obviously can't go back in time, we will be prepared moving forward.


👤 Kaze404
Expanding on your question, will it even matter immediately if they do? If one was found today, how long would it take for it to be available to everyone?

👤 sigmaprimus
I don't think anyone is that sure there will be a vaccine but there is some promising work being done, I believe there are around 70 different vaccines being developed ATM.

One that looks like it may work is from an Israeli group working on a milder corona virus that seems to use the same spiked protiens as the one killing everyone and there is hope that once infected with milder one, the bodies immune system will be able to fight off the deadlier one too.

I makes me wonder, scary as it is, that is if the milder virus can make us immune would it be worth the risk releasing a live version into the population? This would greatly reduce the time required to produce and distribute a life saving vaccine and effectively make it free for everyone.


👤 blaser-waffle
Not discussing it's possibility with the public -- "there is no cure!!" -- would cause a panic. There is no situation where "we're not working on vaccine" will sell well with anyone anywhere.

👤 mb_72
There is an informative and balanced take on this on the ABC News (Australia) site:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/health/2020-04-17/coronavirus-va...


👤 2rsf
Partial answer- because Corona is not new and some work has already began a while ago.

For example this [1] Israeli company

> MIGAL initiated its Corona-vaccine development program four years ago with $4 million funding by the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture.

Although it was originally for chickens...

[1] http://www.migal.org.il/en/node/7010


👤 LoSpietato
Billionaires are very preoccupied in saving the rest 99% dreamers but before the vaccine come out show me the money.

It seems a negotiation between drug dealers in dirt dark alley.