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Flu vaccines are effective — but the government has to try to predict which specific strains of flu will be active that season. If they mispredict, you might ge
by tylerhou 6y ago
Flu vaccines are effective — but the government has to try to predict which specific strains of flu will be active that season. If they mispredict, you might get the flu despite having the vaccine since you got a different strain.
For COVID-19, there is a known set of strains that hopefully won't change. So a vaccine targeted towards that set should work, at least temporarily.
The following is just me speculating: from what I have heard, coronaviruses are called such because of distinctive proteins on the outside of the cell that are hard for the virus to change. If a vaccine elicited an immune response to target such a protein, then it should be effective for all the strains.
- ballenf 6y agoMy point was not that Covid vaccines will be ineffective, just that people have relatively little faith in flu vaccines right now (although I still get one every year, because better than nothing). And I think people will see a covid vaccine as more like a flu vaccine than an MMR vaccine.