BuckyB93 wrote: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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.... 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.