Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

https://twitter.com/statesdj/status/1252698777296797698?s=21

> If you’re hoping a vaccine is going to be a knight in shining armor saving the day, you may be in for a disappointment. SARSCOV2 is a highly contagious virus. A vaccine will need to induce durable high level immunity, but coronaviruses often don’t induce that kind of immunity 1/ > There’s a nice preprint just out on antibody responses to SARSCOV2. Lots of people don’t develop much of an IgM response and the IgG response fades noticeably after just two months https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.15.20066407v... 2/ This is consistent with the other human coronaviruses. They induce an immune response, but it tends to fade so the same virus can reinfect us a year or two later. https://t.co/MFQyjhZF0T?amp=1 3/ The experience with veterinary vaccines for coronaviruses is also not great. There are economically important coronaviruses infecting farm animals and we’ve been trying to develop good vaccines for decades. Most on these vaccines are putzy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7138383/ 4/

The thread’s longer but the prognosis is not good.

I've been receiving the influenza vaccination every year. It wouldn't be a huge problem to receive also SARS-CoV-2 vaccination on top of that. Also at some point my kid received Rota-virus vaccinations every 3-6 months. It would be a hassle to inject everyone but doable in a country with modern medical system.

I don't know what you're trying to accomplish with this kind of speculation in the context of the thread (namely: infected people might not develop immunity, therefore herd immunity might not be possible).

Is it possible that we won't develop an effective vaccine? Yes, of course. We've never successfully made a coronavirus vaccine.

But 1) that doesn't tell you much about the natural state of immunity for a virus (i.e. there are/were lots of viruses that infer immunity for which we had difficulty creating a vaccine), and 2) let's say you're right, and it isn't possible to gain immunity at all...what are we supposed to do then? Lock ourselves inside forever?

Obviously, we're eventually going to end this, one way or another. Either we achieve herd immunity, or we just learn to live with another endemic virus that is occasionally fatal to a small percentage of the infected.

I feel like there are a lot of "contrarian" types here who just want to make a fetish of the societal doom aspect of this thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com