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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else worried that there won't actually be a usable vaccine for C19? After all, we don't have a vaccine for any other coronavirus. What makes people think we'll have it for this one, let alone "within a year"?

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We don't have a vaccine for any other coronavirus because it's not really worth it; most people with the common cold coronaviruses only have mild symptoms. A SARS 1.0 vaccine was in development at one point, but they stopped because the virus was eradicated.

Also worth noting that coronaviruses only cause a portion of common colds. So it would maybe be 4-8 vaccines a year to stop perhaps 20% of common colds.

I hate colds, so I might do that, but it would hardly be a best seller.

> most people with the common cold coronaviruses only have mild symptoms.

Couldn't the same be said for the common flu? Most people shrug off influenza, but they develop a new vaccine for that something like twice a year (the efficacy of which isn't great.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_vaccine#Effectivenes...)

The efficacy of the influenza vaccine has a lot to do with the influenza virus genome, which is fairly different than coronaviruses, and due to that mutates far quicker.

Yes but I think the flu shot speaks to the industry's willingness to devote a lot of resources over-and-over again to a vaccine for an illness that isn't serious for most people.

> most people with the common cold coronaviruses only have mild symptoms

Pretty sure the same could be said of C19, depending on how you define "most". However, cursory googling shows that there are _1 billion_ cases of common cold in the US alone every year (lots of people have it more than once), so it'd still seem like it'd be worthwhile if it were doable. Common cold accounts for 40% of all time lost from jobs and 30% of lost school time.

Only a minority of colds are caused by Cornaviruses though. Something like 20%

That's still 200M in the US alone.

There are at least four coronaviruses that cause the common cold. And immunity lasts only 6-12 months. So, this would be 4-8 vaccinations per year, for life, to reduce colds by 20%.

I might do that myself, but I’m not sure it would sell well enough to fund the costs of developing the vaccine.

The common cold is caused by _many_ coronaviruses and many non-coronaviruses. At least 200 in total, I believe. You’d need to develop (and take) tens if not hundreds of vaccines to do anything useful. There has been some work on rhinovirus vaccines, but it’s pretty natural that COVID (and sars-1 and mers, for that matter) get higher priority.

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