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With that said, then a one sise fits all vacinne is highly unlikely, correct? That there will be variants and mutations that will out pace (so to speak) the pro

With that said, then a one sise fits all vacinne is highly unlikely, correct? That there will be variants and mutations that will out pace (so to speak) the protection a given jab is engineered to offer? Long to short, if death prevention is the objective then we need to shift to finding solution that are less specific but still effective. For example, anti virals.

jacquesm 5y ago
The various vaccines have different ways of acting, some will be less specific but also less effective from the start, some will be more specific but run a higher chance of being outdated by future mutations, all of them can only be tested for efficacy against the known strains. So yes, this probably will remain.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>That there will be variants and mutations that will out pace (so to speak) the protection a given jab is engineered to offer? Flu vaccines are also updated on a yearly basis to reflect the strains currently in circultion, so why would the covid vaccines not do the same? This sounds like an anti-viral subscription service. :)
throwawayboise 5y ago
It's like the ideal scenario if you are a multinational pharmaceutical company.
ethbr0 5y ago
The immune system (and vaccines) operate mostly on the external bits of a viral particle. These bits perform several critical functions: hiding from the immune system, attaching to cells the virus needs to replicate in, etc. Changing any of these things results in two questions. (1) Does the change make the virus better or worse at X? (where X is something related to what that bit was doing) (2) Does the change make the virus more or less visible / resistant to the immune system? The answer to both of these are independent, and for any one particular change, depends all the way down to chemistry and physics. It's possible that a given virus design cannot mutate external features without rendering itself ineffective. It's also possible that relatively minor mutations can make it more effective and/or able to avoid antibodies and the immune system. The mutation space has been studied for SARS-CoV-2, but to put it simply, it's a very complicated problem that involves (among other things) protein folding and molecular simulation. Not easy stuff to brute force.

jacquesm 5y ago

The various vaccines have different ways of acting, some will be less specific but also less effective from the start, some will be more specific but run a higher chance of being outdated by future mutations, all of them can only be tested for efficacy against the known strains. So yes, this probably will remain.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>That there will be variants and mutations that will out pace (so to speak) the protection a given jab is engineered to offer? Flu vaccines are also updated on a yearly basis to reflect the strains currently in circultion, so why would the covid vaccines not do the same? This sounds like an anti-viral subscription service. :)

throwawayboise 5y ago

It's like the ideal scenario if you are a multinational pharmaceutical company.

ethbr0 5y ago

The immune system (and vaccines) operate mostly on the external bits of a viral particle. These bits perform several critical functions: hiding from the immune system, attaching to cells the virus needs to replicate in, etc. Changing any of these things results in two questions. (1) Does the change make the virus better or worse at X? (where X is something related to what that bit was doing) (2) Does the change make the virus more or less visible / resistant to the immune system? The answer to both of these are independent, and for any one particular change, depends all the way down to chemistry and physics. It's possible that a given virus design cannot mutate external features without rendering itself ineffective. It's also possible that relatively minor mutations can make it more effective and/or able to avoid antibodies and the immune system. The mutation space has been studied for SARS-CoV-2, but to put it simply, it's a very complicated problem that involves (among other things) protein folding and molecular simulation. Not easy stuff to brute force.