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Comment by zeofig | Hacker News Reader

That's all well and good, but you can't realistically expect a vaccine to be created. It MIGHT be created, or it might not. There are many viruses for which we've tried and failed to produce effective vaccines.

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To be fair, the blend of incentive structure and technology is a little different now.

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.

I don't have numbers, but it's mentioned that many recovered patients have low amounts of antibodies and immunity could be more a temporary affair.

> There are many viruses for which we've tried and failed to produce effective vaccines.

This is the first time in modern history where every developed country in the world has top researchers expediting work on a vaccine. A virus has never been the world's top economic and political issue until now. Comparing it to vaccine research on other viruses is irrelevant.

Not true at all. There are issues with making vaccines for some viruses that are well-understood and seemingly quite intractable. And what about HIV? We've spent far more resources trying to find a cure for that, and although some good treatments exist, there is no vaccine.

People don’t survive HIV and it mutates incredibly quickly.

Is it the mutation rate that makes it challenging? Or something else, line how it defeats the immune system?

Yeah HIV mutates extremely quickly. Over time people develope multiple strains circulating. Directly targets immune cells. Also I believe it tends to stitch itself into cells DNA and remain latent indeterminate amounts of time.

Mutation rate combined with the fact that no one has ever recovered from aids. Vaccines typically “teach” the body how to fend off a virus, but we’ve never seen someone do that once infected.

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