Excargodog

That’s for military troops. You can do ANYTHING with military troops. We once set off an above ground nuclear explosion and then marched troops up to the (melted and mangled) base of the tower just to see if they’d actually do it.



https://www.npr.org/2012/10/12/16272...est-a-disgrace

Convincing a third of a billion civilians to take an unproven vaccine is orders of magnitude more difficult.

rickair7777

Most of us have shot cards as long as my arm filled with a variety of vaccines. What's one more?

Logistics can be solved, we have people for that... and it's already being done. They're not waiting for vaccine approval. Best vs. worst case logistics probably changes the timeline by 6-12 months. Remember, there has never before in history been this much motivation, technology, and money thrown at a medical problem.

Remember, with ebola few people actually cared that much about it, it's an isolated problem that's been proven time and again to be self-limiting in the developed world. Similar with SARS, they actually developed a vaccine but then put it on the shelf and didn't test/certify it because it wasn't worth the cost given the relatively tiny number of actual cases.

BoilerUP

Decades-long political/social unrest doesn't have anything to do with the clinical efficacy of a vaccine.

I would agree that attempting 327M+ vaccines in the US would be a monumental undertaking facing a substantial amount of refusal. While that's a very real obstacle, SARS-CoV-2's IFR is orders of magnitude lower than Ebola Zaire and this ain't the virus from Contagion.

An approved SARS-CoV-2 vaccine would most likely first be deployed to medical professionals and first responders, then various critical essential infrastructure employees, then demographics at high risk of poor outcomes, then everybody else who hasn't already tested positive with possible ring vaccination around confirmed positive cases mixed in there.

And yeah some people would refuse, and that'd be their prerogative...but we're not eliminating this thing like smallpox in one or two or even ten years anyway.

rickair7777

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-h...-idUSKCN24N1I9

Excargodog

Which was my point exactly.

Unless, of course, it simply burns itself out like the Spanish Flu did after a couple of years and 13 years before the first primitive flu vaccine was even developed. It is after all a NOVEL human pathogen and we simply don’t know for sure what it’s natural course may be.

Excargodog

I am not unaware of the resources being thrown at the problem, but this is biology and queuing theory - not chemistry - and many aspects are simply not amenable to the law of mass action.

A couple of teenagers with no more resources than the backseat of a parked car can produce a viable human life in nine months, maybe even twins or triplets, but that doesn’t mean that nine pairs of teenagers in the backseats of nine parked cars can produce a viable human life in a month.

The math may work but the biology doesn’t.

Downtime

It is not all about the mortality. It is about preventing injury from the disease and it’s about reducing the number of people needing fifteen nights average in the hospital. Yes COVID is gonna circulate but if a vaccine makes it truly just the flu then we have solved a whole lot of problems with it.

GeeWizDriver

Awesome analogy.

GeeWizDriver

Given the well-known challenges, long development periods, pitfalls, and wildly variable results of a new vaccine, wouldn’t those billions be better spent on developing promising treatments that could turn a positive case into nothing more than a garden-variety cold?

rickair7777

IIRC correctly, they're doing that too. But a vaccine is actually easier because you know precisely by what mechanism the virus invades a cell, so it's relatively easy to design a short-circuit at the molecular level. That was actually done within hours of the viral genome being mapped and released. The rest is testing, safety validation, and production. Safety is really the big question mark... relatively easy to make a vaccine that stimulates an immune response against covid, but no way to guarantee that it won't interfere with some other natural process in the body hence all the safety trials.