(Unfortunately, since common cold research is a lot less big, glamourous and high-profile than Covid-19, I don't think we know a huge amount for sure about the other human coronaviruses - and what we do know isn't exactly front-page headline news.)
edit to remove the phrases: "pandemic" & "new normal"
..and Immune Enhancement Syndrome one of the serious consequences of the SARS1 and MERS vaccines that never made it past their trials.
There are a lot of factors to immunity beyond antibodies. Traditional vaccines are either close viruses in the animal world (horsepox for smallpox) or heat treated inactivated virus (flu). We know they produce anitbodies, but there are hundreds of other parts of our immune system (complement system, inane, etc.) that might interact and form memory as well.
Vaccines come out of bad places; from eras where hundreds if not thousands of people were going blind, dying or getting paralyzed by disease. It was easier to just test things on people back then too, and a lot of them died (Chinese were inoculating people with actual smallpox 300 years before Jenner discovered making a vaccine from Cowpox/horsepox).
In the 1970s, the Swing Flu vaccine was a disaster. Sure millions of people got the vaccine and were fine, but 3,000 people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome. Some still have trouble walking or smiling (see the 60 Minutes documentary from that era)
Vaccines need a lot of testing. I do not understand why we're trusting the man who gave us Windows 95 to lead the Gates/Gavi alliance responsible for giving us a "safe" vaccine in less than a year. That's insane.
On a similar note: when a vaccine gets developed, does it make more sense to vaccinate those age groups (on the grounds that it will protect the most vulnerables) or to vaccinate everybody else (on the grounds that the vaccines may not be 100% safe and thus it may be safer for those age groups to benefit from the herd immunity)?
Vaccine deployment won't eradicate the virus immediately, so the most at-risk populations will likely need to be personally vaccinated before they can safely stop social distancing.
If mild common cold can make you immune to covid19, delibirate infections may be a much more efficient way to achieve herd immunity than a propiatary vaccine.
Of course this is all hand waving, but the point is we shouldn't automatically think that a man made vaccine is a much better solution.
Ah yes, we surely shouldn't automatically about anything. We should use reason and data.
The more money is at stake the greater force is applied. The last few years have proven what a devastating effect it had on our ability to discuss and think reasonably about anything.
Let's say you have a 5% chance of dying from COVID-19, a 10% chance of contracting it, but only a 0.05% chance of dying from some harmless coronavirus that would reduce your chance of dying from COVID-19 by half. It would be irrational not to deliberately contract the harmless coronavirus.
The problem is just that we don't know all these variables, especially for a given individual.
Being together with other humans is always a health risk if you want to look at it like that. While it might be incredible stupid to not take the lesser risk, you cannot force people to be rational.
I'm still a little scared by the Moderna vaccine because the mechanism for RNA vaccines is so new, and this one's being rushed out. Give a choice between that an a month of common colds, I'd take the colds.
I'd say that there's a 70% chance that there's millions of doses available for North America by late January of a >50% efficacy vaccine with a high production rate from that point.
There are so many different vaccine efforts now, and so many of them producing at risk. Some will work. It's just a question of how high the efficacy is and the duration of protection.
> ..and Immune Enhancement Syndrome one of the serious consequences of the SARS1 and MERS vaccines that never made it past their trials.
A lot of us were worried about antibody dependent enhancement. But we've had basically no evidence that this is a significant concern: successful treatment with convalescent plasma, successful challenge tests with vaccines in animal models, successful monoclonal antibody therapies in animal tests, etc, all point the other way.
> Sure millions of people got the vaccine and were fine, but 3,000 people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome.
And this wasn't a good trade, because the vaccine probably saved a lot fewer than 3,000 lives. But at this point, you'd save a whole lot of lives even with a vaccine that bad. (And we're not going quite that quick that time around and we have somewhat better tools to prevent bad outcomes).
> I do not understand why we're trusting the man who gave us Windows 95 to lead the Gates/Gavi alliance responsible for giving us a "safe" vaccine in less than a year.
??? Now you've gone completely off the rails. Gavi's primary role is as a purchaser of vaccines and not in development. The couple dozen vaccine development efforts worldwide are what we can expect to yield a vaccine.
Yeah, good last resort, not first.
Sure, the Oxford vaccine uses an adenovirus that is not present in humans outside Africa, but when they try to make a second vaccine, based on the same adenovirus, people who took the COVID-19 vaccine might not be protected.
So while not tested, mRNA might be a much better bet for the future, because we will be able to develop vaccines much faster and not have to search for a new virus vector each time a new vaccine is developed.
It looks like the side effects from mRNA vaccines are bigger than a typical vaccination. It's starting to look like mRNA vaccines may not be the vaccine you'd want in the long term based on this alone. The question is, do they create high severity side effects that preclude using them in the short term? We're about to learn...
There's a lot of other efforts; adenovirus vectors, attenuated efforts, non-replicating virus efforts. Of course, the adenovirus vectors are of concern because if immunity wears off, you can't necessarily give someone a booster a couple years later.
Both Gavi and the Gates Foundation are intended to create "healthy markets" for vaccines. Gates didn't design Windows 95 either; he was a business and marketing guy promoting it. It's not the development that's the issue, it's the fact that these alliances are profit motivated and vaccines have been a loosing bet for years due to the incredibly amount of research funding needed to bring one to market.
Their motives for rushing a vaccine to market right now are not altruistic. They want to prove they can bring vaccines for novel viruses to the market quickly. It could work, but it could also be a disaster. The fact that this is an 'emergency' allows them to avoid a lot of regulations, and even liability if the trials end up making people sick or killing them.
> Edward Jenner, FRS FRCPE[1] (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine.[2][3]