The vaccines are very effective in preventing severe illness and death. That's an enormous success, especially if you consider the speed of development.
The difficulty of developing vaccines varies a lot depending on the characteristics of the virus. For some we still can't manage to do this, others we have fully or mostly eradicated by vaccines already. There are ideas for vaccines that might help to also prevent infection with the newer COVID variants, e.g. the nose spray vaccines. But those have to be funded and developed, and that seems rather slow right now.
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.
Given that people survive it and then have large amount of antibodies, it seems likely that we can create a vaccine. While some viruses are incredibly challenging to make a vaccine for, like HIV and the flu due to the mutation rate. The coronavirus has a slower mutation rate than the flu. It may be the case that we end up needing yearly or every two year booster shots. But, the most frequent stumbling block for vaccine development is funding, which won’t be a problem for coronavirus. MERS and SARS both had promising vaccine research that were shelved because the infections died out.
The smallpox and polio vaccines worked well. The corona shots have people still getting sick and transmitting live virus. That was not success even a couple years ago.
It will be quite hard to “eradicate” Covid around the world, but with luck vaccines will provide lasting immunity, enough to end the pandemic, return life to more or less normal, and prevent tens of millions of deaths.
Empirically, SARS-CoV-2 mutates much more slowly than influenza viruses, and if a new strain eventually pops up that the vaccine and people’s antibodies do not work on, the current vaccines should be faster to modify than to recreate from scratch.
Coronavirus are not likely to be as difficult to develop a vaccine to as viruses like HIV and flu that have high mutation rates and frequent genetic rearrangements. Always temper expectations, but we have a very good, well defined target (the spike protein), strong proof of concept data from sars and mers, and a huge number of active vaccine development programs for a lot of shots on goal. Temper your expectations, but if you are given an opportunity to place a bet, I'd personally put money down on a vaccine being approved within the next two years over not.
"Vaccines becoming really effective" is a far cry from eradication. There's still no reason to believe we can eradicate Covid in the foreseeable future.
...pretty good chances of coming up with a vaccine in about 1 year.
This is just wishful thinking. We've never had effective vaccines for this sort of virus. (The yearly flu vaccine is like 30% effective.) Sure lots of research groups are working on vaccines, but many of them are academics who have no particular duty to work on research likely to have an immediate payoff. The researchers who do have such a duty, i.e. those who work for private drug firms, are mostly developing treatments like the antiviral remdesivir. Effective treatments of various sorts are closer than any vaccine, for COVID-19. IMHO, the most likely eventual winner will be a scaled-up version of the convalescent plasma therapy, which unlike the current version will be able to produce effective antibodies without drawing blood from humans.
I agree with the last part of your statement, but not the first. By the time an effective vaccine is developed and run through human trials, most of the population will already have gotten Covid, so it's not likely to be a savior moment. Additionally, given how many vaccine candidates are already in the pipeline, it's pretty likely there will be multiple options approved within a few months of each other.
On a related note, if China wants to improve its STEM research prestige level, it needs to do something about the rampant fraud in research results that cause a lot of people to be highly skeptical of anything they publish.
It's hard to talk about the COVID vaccine in the context of other vaccines.
The history of our attempts at developing traditional vaccines for this type of virus goes back 50 years, and we've been very unsuccessful at it, not for lack of trying.
I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that we wont ever be able to develop a vaccine for this type of virus in the same manner that we have for e.g. polio.
Where Covid vaccination could work (remains to be seen) is if, combined with other mitigation measures, it brings the effective reproduction rate down low enough and for long enough to eradicate the virus. Problem is, the long tail can last for years, and every time the goal has been within grasp, people would see the falling numbers and assume that meant it was already over. Vaccination makes that less of a problem.
Polio and MMR vaccines aren't 99.9999% effective, either. More like 80-99%. A breakthrough is extremely unlikely because you're not likely to be exposed to those viruses at all anymore. But it took decades to reach this point.
Up to now, Covid hasn't been lethal enough or common enough for 100% of people to want to be vaccinated.
It takes multiple people among one's friends and family dropping like flies to convince people in vaccine-hesitant places with ample supply (e.g. Bulgaria) to chose to get vaccinated.
Also it wouldn't hurt if vaccines were actually effective at preventing infection (rather than allowing infection but preventing severe disease)... and if they lasted more than half a year.
There are multiple vaccine candidates that have passed phase I trials, have demonstrated they produce antibodies in humans, and have demonstrated they are successful in animal challenge trials. The chance's are good that we have a working vaccine by end of year, and the chances are very good that we have one sometime next year.
In the unlikely event it turns out that we can't develop a vaccine in the near future, we'll have to just deal with the disease long term. If we try to keep the world economy shut down for more than a few months at a time, we'll kill more people than COVID would. And as other people have pointed out, college students are very low risk.
I agree, but vaccines in this case have their definite drawbacks as seen in vaccine-heavy Israel in that their effectiveness wears off after a few months.
I have personally heard of a number of pretty bad breakthrough cases where a person has had a fever for almost a month, another was extremely sick and there are still people who are afraid of covid for this very reason(and they are vaccinated). Having an effective anti-viral solution will bring down the fear about these scenarios and get people back to work and bring normalcy to society again.
We are still learning to treat severe cases so we get to a higher survival rate and we might get a vaccine at the end of the year. There are benefits to slowing the spread.
I think a vaccine is quite likely to be developed within the next couple years, the virus isn't as complex or difficult as influenza or hiv to target and we have some well defined targets to go after, as well as numerous vaccines already in clinical trials.
Not just "until there's a vaccine", but "until there's a safe and effective vaccine", which is a feat several orders of magnitude harder, that has not been achieved against any other coronavirus.
Definitely. Unfortunately vaccination is political everywhere and there are also profit interests, so they can't just use the "better" vaccines.
With the mRNA vaccines and the weaker virus variants, we averted a lot of deaths and the "collapse" of the hospitals in many places. But we are still dealing with many dead, millions of work days lost per year, and many cases of long covid...
I'm not aware of a single working Covid-19 vaccine, which ones would that be? There are promising candidates, sure, but I don't think any have already been shown to be both effective and safe, which I'd say is required for one to be working, on the timescales that are needed, and I wouldn't know how one might do that so quickly. The current forerunners might well not work out, though I hope at least one of them will work, but my understanding is that anything immunity-related is fiendishly hard.
The difficulty of developing vaccines varies a lot depending on the characteristics of the virus. For some we still can't manage to do this, others we have fully or mostly eradicated by vaccines already. There are ideas for vaccines that might help to also prevent infection with the newer COVID variants, e.g. the nose spray vaccines. But those have to be funded and developed, and that seems rather slow right now.
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