Interesting... the common cold and the flu also tend to mutate to be resistant to past immunity. I wonder if we’re on a the cusp of finally finding cures for these types of rapidly mutating viruses.
The common cold is an even more extreme version of that process but we haven't figured out an economic way of developing rapid vaccine candidates for rhino/coronavirus strains like we have for the flu. Moderna's RNA method might be a game changer here but it'll take a while for their method to be approved as a platform instead of a single drug candidate.
This doesn't make sense. Of course we cannot predict what mutation will happen. Are you trying to say we don't know which mutation take off? Even then the issue that we don't know what future mutation might take off is a problem.
> each seasonal flu vaccine is really a combination of three different strains
This year it was 4 different strains.
> it's impractical, even dangerous, to give them all of the strains at once
I've never heard this before. Can you provide a citation so I can verify it?
>The common cold is an even more extreme version of that process
There are a lot of different viruses for the common cold. There have been vaccines for them, but the odds of catching any one strain are so low that a vaccine against one isn't really significant.
We will know in a couple years how successful we are.