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Comment by glial | Hacker News Reader

> Rather, there would be delta- and omicron-specific vaccine.

I think there are -- they just haven't made it through the trials and approval processes yet. These are press releases from Pfizer for whatever it's worth:

Omicron: https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

Mentions delta: https://cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/2021-07/Delta_Variant_Study...

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Yes, but what I meant was those would be already approved.

What's the rationale behind your assertion?

Regulation will take time to catch up. We manage to create and approve a flu vaccine every year, and that's likely because the general process has been approved, and so each iteration is fast tracked. I don't think that's the case with mRNA vaccines yet.

The yearly flu shot is composed of preexisting vaccines, they're not developed anew each year.

I assume that still has something to do with mRNA being a novel vaccine type. Therefore the regulatory bodies are still carefull. If Moderna, Biontech and other potential players show again and again that there process of developing new vaccines is safe, I'd guess the time to market will getting shorter and shorter.

you can't do this since you need studies and those take time. Depending in the size of your cohort and the current viral load in the population. Curevacs study had the problem that during this time in germany the corona-virus wasn't that common so nobody knew whether the vaccine is working.

As I understood it, the actual vaccine was developed super quickly and then everybody waited for the results of the study.

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