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Comment by chimprich | Hacker News Reader

> Vaccines for new families of viruses traditionally take years or decades to develop.

Traditionally many things used to take an awful lot longer than it does now (e.g. gene sequencing). Technology advances.

Also, this vaccine was based on an earlier one developed for MERS so they weren't starting from scratch.

> We still don't have vaccines for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes

That's completely irrelevant because they're very different viruses. Vaccination for a coronavirus should be a lot easier.

> But I do have concerns on trying to push out any novel vaccine in less than two years without adequate testing

It is undergoing extensive testing. Tens of thousands of people are currently being given the vaccine. The timeline is not really relevant; what counts is the testing that is carried out.

I'm sure the Oxford University team has given proper consideration to safety.

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> Traditionally many things used to take an awful lot longer than it does now (e.g. gene sequencing). Technology advances.

This may be true with chips and gene sequencing, but is not true for vaccines. The waiting period for vaccines is mainly for safety and efficacy, not waiting on technology like the other two.

We may become more certain some vaccines are safer given intrinsic properties, but that probably won't result in any statistically noticeable difference because it's very hard to tell how a vaccine will behave without actually trying it as far as I understand it.

> That's completely irrelevant because they're very different viruses. Vaccination for a coronavirus should be a lot easier [than for retroviruses like HIV/Herpes].

Why is that? Uneducated guess: because of the rapid mutations of those viruses and the way they go dormant and hide?

There's no known natural immunity for HIV. Vaccines work by triggering an immune response, but if there isn't an immune response that works, a vaccine won't be effective.

It's a bit more complicated than that. HIV does generate antibodies. Your body does fight HIV and remove it from your system. (The rapid test for HIV tests for those antibodies. If you test positive, you still need a viral load test).

The trouble with HIV is during the infection process, it has an reverse transcriptase enzyme and an integrase enzyme, the two of which allow it to build DNA sequences and alter the host DNA. It permanently alters the host, allowing the virus to continue reproducing.

There are some people for which this modification does nothing (long term non-progressives), but the for the majority of human beings, their immune system collapses within a few months or years (without treatment).

Thanks for the clarification. After I sent that message I was thinking that my understanding was probably way too simple.

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