Hacker News Reader

If we had robust enough theory of vaccine testing it wouldn’t matter what kind of vaccine you develop, right?

Maybe, maybe not? Mrna vaccines are very customizable so they could be specifically engineered to avoid known safety issues for example.

I'm not from a bio-science area but AFAIK mRNA vaccines are robust.

1. The same mechanism of deliver is used so it's already tested and know to be safe/effective.

2. It replicates the same protein(s) found on the virus. So it will not due more damage than getting the virus and it will have a high probability of being effective.

If we can do it this fast and this safely for COVID, we should do the same for this disease.

Efficacy trials are quick for a disease with 100k infections a day. It's much slower for something that has that many cases a year. It's much harder to tell a statistical difference from noise when you're talking minuscule cases in trial groups.

> The slow part is the safety testing right?

No, the slow part is the efficacy testing.