The negativity around this in kind of mind-blowing to me. I would absolutely love access to an effective pan-flu vaccine. I wonder if someday my fantasy of a universal Rhinovirus vaccine could become reality too. I can only hope.
The issue is how hard is it to make a vaccine vs how hard is it to create a pandemic strain. Seeing as we haven't got a permanent vaccine against flu yet, I don't think the odds are in our favor. We would have to vaccinate against the particular proteins that allow it to be airborne. I don't think we have that kind of technology to specify precisely what our immune system latches onto.
Chances are pretty good that at least one of the vaccines we currently have under development will work decently well. Probably well enough to reduce the risk to be comparable with Influenza. I don't think discussions about a vaccine-free world are particularly productive right now.
Agreed. Also...nasal vaccines are far more effective as they follow the same path as the virus itself. This would be a good thing if they can pull it off.
I wonder if any of the other vaccine candidates offer 100% protection, or near it at least? Still, if everyone got this vaccine, then the infectiousness of the virus would be decimated, so if currently every infected person infects 5 people, in a vaccinated population they would instead infect 0.5 people, causing the pandemic to decline instead of accelerate exponentially like it does now.
As much as I hate anti vaxxers, global vaccination is simply not possible in any ammount of time that would have stopped the pandemic. It will be a routine vaccine worldwide only after the virus went endemic anyway.
“A universal influenza vaccine would be a major public health achievement and could eliminate the need for both annual development of seasonal influenza vaccines, as well as the need for patients to get a flu shot each year,”
There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.
I hope this proves to be real going forward. The vaccination route seems to be hitting a deadend as a way to end the pandemic. The pill will have to be cheap and available over the counter, it makes no sense not to subsidize this.
Clearly Flu, HIV, and Nipah are more pressing, but I found myself wondering last night what the odds are of a rhinovirus vaccine being in the cards thanks to rapid progress SARS-CoV-2 has pressed us to make w.r.t. RNA and protein-like vaccines.
Economics is the largest barrier in my mind. While my understanding is that these vaccines are less expensive to produce, it's hard to convince people to get the flu shot, let alone a common cold shot. What's more is that with hundreds of variants, it's efficacy would be hard to get right.
That said, I'd gladly pay a heft amount yearly if it meant I had a >60% chance of not catching a cold that year.
The biggest problem with the flu vaccine is that there is no "the" flu vaccine. Each year there are attempts at predicting the prevalent strains that year and producing a multivalent vaccine targeting the most likely strains. Some years the prediction is spot on, some it misses badly.
That is exactly what this attempt at a very broad coverage is attempting to change.
The second problem is that this process makes it hard to build up stockpiles to actually provide vaccines to everyone, and so there's little incentive for any broad pushes to increase update outside of specific groups of people.
If this attempt succeeds at getting coverage for a vaccine that can stay the same for longer periods, then expect to see attempts to distribute it more broadly and maybe even attempts to eradicate some of the strains.
This is great. Of the effectiveness is a as good in the long run, we don’t even need a vaccine since it’s no longer a high risk disease. It’ll be a flu like vaccination where elderly and at-risk people can be using it
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