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Comment by tachyonbeam | Hacker News Reader

Maybe? The nice thing about mRNA vaccines is that the formula can be adjusted very rapidly (weeks). I feel like if there was a way to tweak the formula fast enough, we could react as fast as the different viral strains mutate. We would need to change the regulatory framework though. Having to do 3 phases of clinical trial involving tens of thousands of participants makes it hard to adapt fast enough.

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doesn't the regulatory framework allow such changes though? afaik we aren't doing any phase 3 trials for the annual flu shot, or are we? (genuine question) But if we aren't, couldn't we just expand this to also take into account the Covid-shot?

The flu shot gets a special exception to the process. They study safety every year, but not effectiveness. This takes months off the development time.

> we could react as fast as the different viral strains mutate

The number of mutations is proportional to the number of people currently infected. The faster the virus spreads the more variants will be created. The fact that the N501 variant spreads faster seems to imply that the rate of mutations is already in the process of accelerating.

It may make more sense to use evolutionary modeling and analysis of existing SARS-type viruses to create antigens robust to all expected mutations. Here’s one such bit of research: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.17.387092v2

Is the risk that’s being assessed by these trials coming from the delivery method of the vaccine? Perhaps maybe there’s a way to get around some of those regulations.

So we will see weekly news about new strains and new vaccines to prevent them from spreading. This might be a long drawn process.

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