RCR06 said:
BiochemAg97 said:
Counterpoint said:
Question that will probably sound extremely dumb to all the amazing medically knowledgeable folks on here...
For this vaccine, why can't we use the exact same process that we use to make the flu vaccine, except insert the inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus instead of the inactivated flu virus? Or, if that IS how we do it, why do we have to test it for a year or more? If it's because the virus is so new, aren't the flu strains they put in the flu vaccine new every year also?
First, the flu vaccine takes about a year to make in sufficient doses for everyone. That is why it is not always very effective. They have to guess what flu viruses will be the biggest problems the next year, and sometimes they are wrong. So that would take about 12 months.
Second, we would spend 12 months making a vaccine that we have no idea if it works. We do not currently have a human corona virus vaccine and corona viruses behave differently than flu viruses in some aspects.
Sounds like a bad plan to me.
Third, there are several candidate vaccines being tested, including some fairly new vaccine technologies. It is possible that if the newer vaccine technologies work, but everyone is modeling the time frame based on the flu vaccine and/or clinical trial timelines for other recently developed vaccines. It is better to project the expected time based on current knowledge and get the vaccine early than to tell everyone we will have a vaccine in August and not have one until next year.
This is something I've been wondering about and even tried to do some online research about just to see if anyone had successfully made a vaccine for any corona virus. It was very difficult because the first name this virus had in the media was corona virus, which as we now know is a type of virus not the name of this specific one(covid-19). This leads me to believe there's a fair chance this may take longer than 12-18 months to develop. The encouraging thing is that different approaches are being tested across the world so hopefully one will work.
There is a vaccine for corona virus in cows. There is work on a pig vaccine. The human Coronas aren't really a big problem, basically one of at least three families of viruses that is responsible for the "common cold", so probably not a lot of motivation for a vaccine outside of SARS, MERS, and COVID. I believe there was some work on a SARS vaccine, but that issue passed before we got there, so interest and funding likely diminished over time.
This is a summary of SARS vaccine work in early 2000s when SARS was a recent thing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3371787/Lots of animal studies, and concern about the safety of the one being testing in China way back in the early 2000s.
The most recent thing I found was 2014.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24355931Baylor College of Medicine mentions a partnership with Texas Children's to develop SARS and MERS vaccines, but that was the most recent paper I could find, suggesting they weren't doing much in the way of human trials.
Interestingly, the BCM candidate is a yeast produced protein. Flu vaccine production is primarily done by growing virus in chicken eggs and takes a long time. Growing proteins in recombinant yeast would be considerably faster.
What is really sad is that antibodies from mice immunized for SARS-CoV cross reacts with SARS-CoV2 spike protein. If we had finished a SARS vaccine, COVID19 probably wouldn't be a problem because the same vaccine would work.
