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The entirety of my thesis is that it's unlikely that we will have a "vaccine" for the Rona that will be, in the most extreme best case, a 50/50 shot based on what we've been able to accomplish with the standard flu vaccine.

Virus' that have struck us that "behave" closer to the Rona (SARS-CoV & MERS-CoV) don't have any commercially available vaccines... non... nadda...

So if people think that we should remain in lock-down and mandate mask wearing until a vaccine for COVID-19 is implemented then they better be prepared to do so for a LOOOOOOOONNNGGGG time.

Now, I believe that one will be implemented because there is too much invested for one not to be. It will be a magical moment. People will get rich, people will get praised, people will claim success, people will get Nobel prizes... they will ride that victory party and all will be well again in the world. A vaccine will be sold and, at best, it will be a coin flip as to if it really protects you from the Rona.

I don't doubt that mankind will be able to contain, cure if not eliminate viral infections at some point. I'd add cancer to to that too. We just don't know how to do it yet.

Given enough trial and error, developing theories, testing them, leaning from them and massaging the theories, testing them.. and going through the scientific process it will happen but it takes time. Add new tools to the tool box like the nanomaterials you mention, DNA/RNA manipulation and other new discoveries will also help. I'm 100% confident in the human race being able to do that.

As I've said before, we can overcome just about anything just so long as we have the time. The only thing I think that can stop us is not being able to fix the problem (whatever that may be) before it wipes us out or we get wiped out by an act of God (meteor strike, the Sun blowing up) or we destroy ourselves though our own actions or inaction.

Just think of the technology and medical advances we've made in just a couple generations. It's amazing how far we've come in such a short time.

Heard a good slogan for these times today : Mask it or Casket.

I used the common flu virus because it is the closest animal to what we are dealing with which currently has some type of vaccine that the players want. I don’t think the masses realize that the standard flu vaccine is pretty much a crap shoot but they get a warm and fuzzy every fall when the get that shot in the arm or snort up the nose.

We have the current Rona strain in our hands to work with, true. It’s nice to have the exact thing that we are trying to kill so we can study and find it’s weaknesses. We have no information on if and how fast it can mutate. Also, RNA based vaccines are a new tool for us. We are in uncharted territory. Expecting to quickly develop an effective vaccine is a long shot.

Re: Mumps, measles, polio, ect… vaccines have been more successful than 50/50, also true. But those plagued us for generations and we had to tough it out the hard way while the population was able, to some degree, develop herd immunity. Once we figured out that if we inject a “dead” form of into ourselves, it trains our bodies on how to handle it and it still took many years of study and testing (5, 10, 20???) before a vaccine was viable. I also recognize that was way back then and this is now (much more advanced in medical science) but we haven’t been too successful with the COVID family of bugs.

The point is, any vaccine they come up with in the near term isn’t likely to be as successful as some people think or what the media writes, or what the talking heads spew. If you want to lock down and hide until an effective vaccine is developed you’ll be waiting a long time. (My classification of effective is something more along the lines of 75-80+% type of results, not the seasonal flu vaccine scam of fiddy-fiddy).

They will come up with something that kinda works. The headlines will be “FDA Approves Ground Breaking Vaccine for COVID.” Everyone will eat it up without reading any further than the headlines flashing nice and bright on their Yahoo News homepage.

Again, it's not the closest to what we are dealing with. Mainly because the factors which attribute to what you call the flu vaccine being a "crap shoot" don't exist. I don't think you understand how effective antibodies are when your body has been exposed to a disease. There's a reason people don't get the chicken pox a second time. The lower effectiveness of the flu vaccine has nothing to do with the vaccine effectiveness, but rather the choice of flu virus you have been vaccinated against.

Now... is anything certain in life? No. Can covid mutate? Yes. But probably not within the span of the current pandemic.


I agree it can mutate. But then you get another vaccination. As for the RNA vaccine.... well... it's developed. It's in the "does it have severe side effects?" stage. We made it, we put it in small groups of people and they didn't die. And they showed antibodies to the virus. That's a vaccine. It was made. But even if the RNA vaccine gets scrapped in the final phases, we have conventional ones right behind it.


We make a new vaccine for the flu every year. We do it in less than a year, because the epidemiologists stick their fingers in the air, make a guess on the 3 strains they think will be prevalent.... and then inject a bunch of eggs to make vaccines. In a matter of months we have millions of doses.

Your argument that it took us generations to make vaccines before is.... nonsense. Of course it did. We didn't have any ability to even inactivate a virus or bacteria until approximately the 1900s. We now have 3 or 4 different methods of creating a vaccine which can be applied to whatever the $$ tells us is a good idea. As for whether we've been successful in the past with COVID .... we haven't had a reason to actually be successful. Do you think a pharmaceutical company cares about an outbreak in China? or India? As long as those outbreaks were contained, and infection in the states stayed in the low 1000s, there was never any money involved in developing a vaccine. Who would they sell it to? India? HAH! China? Yeah, at a government fixed price.

What we are seeing right here is the best argument against government managed health care ever (I mean, some call it an argument for government managed healthcare because people aren't able to get care... but there's a bigger picture) pharmaceutical companies haven't given two sh$ts about the various strains of this virus for decades. But when the pandemic is primarily in the US, essentially the last country on the planet where a pharmaceutical company can charge whatever they want for a drug or vaccine.... well now.... at that point they got moving real quick. Progress comes from the opportunity to make huge amounts of money off of people.


Again.... you don't understand how vaccines work. Your entire argument for it being less than effective is based on the flu model, which involves wild guesses as to the viral strain.

We know the strain. If the vaccine turns out to be safe... doesn't turn the population into some wild mutated virus-zombie because of the injected RNA... then it will work. Probably as well as other vaccines we all take. Probably as well as your immunity to chicken pox from your childhood infection.

Will we possibly need another shot in a year if this virus mutates quickly enough? Possibly. I'm betting the companies like Moderna are really hoping so.

I remember when Trump said "by the end of the year" and Fauci countered him and said "hopefully by early next year" or something along those lines.

And the liberals rejoiced in Fauci's bold contradiction.

Ahh.
Good times.

Um. End of the year might be pretty aggressive still.
My memory is hazy, and I wasn't usually directly involved in this part of the process, but Phase III usually lasted a year at least. There's a lot of moving parts, including ramp up of commercial production lines.

I know we're dealing with an "emergency" but I don't know if end of year is realistic.

You know who does know? Moderna. Usually you have to submit how long the trial will last when you announce you're entering Phase III (I think this is to keep companies from truncating their data sets if some adverse reactions come in at the end of the study).

You know who I guarantee didn't look it up before saying? Trump. His guess is literally pulled out of his flabby ass.
Does Fauci have Moderna's trial plan? Maybe. I don't know. He might be talking out of his ass too. He seems much more likely a person to have verified prior to making a statement.

Here's a couple interesting, pretty well written articles on both the immune system and the current vaccine attempts. Neither are particularly technical.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/07/covid-19-vaccine-reality-check/614566/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-immunity-is-the-pandemics-central-mystery/614956/

The Vaccine article does mention an interesting issue with vaccinations, simply that you vaccinate the muscle tissue rather than the nasal/mucous membranes. Now honestly, I don't think that's 100% accurate, because it isn't like our B-cells (which are responsible for the antibody production) hang out in the mucous membranes either. They are lymphocytes and are found in the lymph glands and spleen. Their argument is that a lack of antibody response in the respiratory tissue allows the infection to make it "in" before the antibody response in the lungs, leading to what they expect to be diminished effectiveness. Now, this is somewhat illogical (for the reasons I identified above), and the CDC does not identify nasal misting as being any better than the flu shot, and in some years identified the nasal mist as being less effective. So I'm not sure I'd believe that part.

The second article is a fun overview of the immune system. The part that is important when we look at vaccines is in the second half of the article. It's simplistic, but worthwhile.

My general take-away is that if we are unable to have an effective vaccine, that would suggest we also will not have effective immunity to re-infection (a vaccine is essentially stimulating the same part of our immune system as would normally protect you from re-infection). If that's the case, well, at least Social Security is saved because no one's going to get to use it.

so I have you to thank for deleting me from the guest list...but I must admit there were a couple Bread songs I like(d).