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Comment by dstroot | Hacker News Reader

I wonder why everyone believes so strongly we will create a viable vaccine.

The FDA has never approved a vaccine for humans that is effective against any member of the coronavirus family, which includes SARS, MERS, and several that cause the common cold.

If political pressure/regulatory relaxation allows a vaccine to enter the market I would be suspicious of its efficacy.

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SARS burnt out fairly readily with mitigation measures, MERS turns out to be quite difficult to catch at all, and the cold's mortality is low enough it's not an enormous priority (especially when coronaviruses only cause 10-15% of those cases).

The effort spent making a vaccine is going to tend to be proportional to the disease's impact. There's no much point continuing development on a SARS vaccine when it hasn't had a new case in fifteen years, after all.

Not exactly true. Moderna, and several others who are leading the vaccine race right now are out front because they had viable SARS and MERS vaccines but no where to test it other than in animal models.

Coronaviruses are easy to vaccinate against. They mutate very slowly. There’s just not a viable business model for them when the symptoms are so mild and treatments are available cheaply over-the-counter.

> Coronaviruses are easy to vaccinate against. They mutate very slowly.

Wait can you expand on that? I thought RNA viruses mutate very quickly?

From what I understand, covid is a relatively small rna strand vs e.g. the flu which makes significant mutation way more rare

SARS-CoV-2 genome size is ~30 kb [1], influenza A genome size is ~14 kb [2]. A protein encoded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome is predicted to have exonuclease proofreading activity, which would result in a lower mutation rate [3].

[1] https://mra.asm.org/content/9/11/e00169-20

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus#Structure_...

[3] https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...

> Coronaviruses are easy to vaccinate against.

From what I've read, creating a sufficiently safe vaccine has been quite a challenge.

Most think it is worthwhile trying to create a vaccine rather than just giving up and not even trying.

Nobody who knows anything about Coronavirus vaccines thinks it will be easy, but just because something is hard should not be a reason for not trying, especially when the reward for success is huge. All I can say is I am glad Salk and all the other Polio vaccine researchers didn’t just give up without trying because it was difficult.

I don't think anyone's arguing we shouldn't try.

I think the grandparent post is wondering why everyone is so confident we'll _succeed_.

There are people who think we should lock down everything for 12 months because a vaccine will be done by then. Really. There are. That point of view just completely boggles my mind.

But we still have to try.

I am not sure everyone is so confident which is why so many approaches are being tried.

We may not need a vaccine. This was about gene deletions as opposed to mutations. A while back there was an analysis of what each gene coded for. A number of them seemed to suppress natural responses to infection, so it seemed obvious that a less deadly version was just a few deletions away.

If infectiosness could be maintained while reducing death rate (a big if) then you'd have a naturally spreading vaccine. Theoretically we only need to quarantine the severe cases and let it evolve to a cold.

IIRC by the time a SARS vaccine came out, human transmission had already been stopped through other measures. There was no ethical way to do human clinical trials.

> If political pressure/regulatory relaxation allows a vaccine to enter the market I would be suspicious of its efficacy.

and/or its safety.

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