It has been heavily modified, first so it cannot cause infections in people and also to make it "look" more like coronavirus. Scientists did this by transferring the genetic instructions for the coronavirus's "spike protein" - the crucial tool it uses to invade our cells - to the vaccine they were developing.
Amusingly, lives would probably be saved if they had kept the base virus used for vaccination infectious. It's just the common cold, and the side effects are currently only a headache and fever, so getting the vaccination virus secondhand would be better than getting coronavirus, and you'd be protected after.
Assuming everybody got the vaccine in the same instant, which they would not.
> We should still shelter in place, but even turning active cases into carries would reduce loss of life (presuming we continue regular testing so people can KNOW if they are a carrier)
We've all seen how people are behaving right now: "Oh I'm young, forget about grandma". How do you think they'd behave knowing that they've been vaccinated? It's important to consider the sociological conditions in which an intervention is deployed. Unfortunately, our present society has a very large number of self-centred individuals.
The more people take the vaccine, the less society bothers to social distance and other low-tech things, the more dangerous not taking the vaccine becomes.
It would also matter for eradicating the virus. If it keeps circulating, and vaccines only provide protection for less than a lifetime, then we will have to keep vaccinating just about everyone in the world indefinitely. Any place that falls into civil strife could also expect a virus outbreak eventually.
It would still be great to have vaccine that merely made the virus without effect! But eradication would be better.
Are any epidemiologists talking about possibly eliminating it completely? Seems like the toothpaste is out of the tube for that.
We have only eliminated one virus globally (smallpox) but plenty of others have been eliminated nationally. Then to travel to those countries from a country where the disease is endemic you generally need proof of vaccination.
There are also many countries that have basically eliminated the virus at present. They’re not going to want to import the virus just because other countries failed.
Once you have two things the probable future becomes clear: a vaccine, and very fast tests. Combined, they will make it fairly easy for a well governed country to eliminate the virus.
Then, any entering traveler from an endemic country would require proof of vaccination and a quick test at customs to confirm. That would keep the virus out of eliminated countries.
After that it would be a global effort to eradicate the virus country by country, just like we’ve been doing with other diseases such as polio.
A key feature of sars-cov-2 is that it is not like the flu. Coronavirus spreads in clusters and this is containable.
Which is to say, it'll be like the seasonal flu and not a pandemic. Yeah, we can tolerate that.
Current flu vaccine coverage is 24-50% depending on jurisdiction, once per year. So, aiming at, say, 80% coverage twice per year would be 3-6x the current level of flu vaccination effort.
Not awful, but tiresome.