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Covid

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Do you honestly think a successful COVID vaccine will happen within the next 18 months?

170 replies

DreamChaser23 · 16/05/2020 20:42

I feel that it is not guaranteed and this may be something that we have to be used to for many years to come..

OP posts:
jasjas1973 · 16/05/2020 22:08

The other thing likely to happen is the virus becomes less dangerous as it evolves which is normally what happens with viruses

Really?? AIDS, Smallpox, Ebola, Spanish flu, Measles... shall i go on?

No guarantees CV wont mutate into something far worse, which is exactly what spanish flu did in the 1918.

Seasonal flu does not have a death rate of 10% you are just making numbers up now and as we don't know the prevalence of CV in the community (officially its confirmed 240k, deaths 34k) we don't know its fatality rate.... Johnson isn't old, no underlying conditions but apparently almost died...50/50. So 0.05 % seems rather low for the world to shut its self down.

VideographybyLouBloom · 16/05/2020 22:16

I do think there will be a vaccine within the next 18 months and within a few years it will be as commonplace as having an annual flu jab. I highly doubt there will be an available vaccine by the end of this year though.

Florencemattell · 16/05/2020 22:19

No

CloudsCanLookLikeSheep · 16/05/2020 22:21

Theoretically yes, they may produce it in the testing lab, but to produce on a mass scale to innoculate the whole country, it will take a lot longer

Eebahgumlass · 16/05/2020 22:22

No.Sorry if this has already been posted. But there is a reason clinical trials take a long time. Vaccine trials are especially challenging especially with social distancing. www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-covid-vaccine.html

Pinkandwhiteblossom · 16/05/2020 22:26

Given the lack of success in finding vaccines against coronaviruses to date (SARS anyone?!) I think the chances of there being a vaccine against COVID-19 anytime soon are incredibly slim

donquixotedelamancha · 16/05/2020 22:29

Given the lack of success in finding vaccines against coronaviruses to date (SARS anyone?!) I think the chances of there being a vaccine against COVID-19 anytime soon are incredibly slim

Have you considered reading the thread?

VideographybyLouBloom · 16/05/2020 22:30

@Pinkandwhiteblossom please see upthread for an explanation on the abandoned SARS vaccine testing.

Sunshinegirl82 · 16/05/2020 22:31

There are several coronavirus vaccines for animals. If we can find one for chickens I’m sure we can find one for humans!

The SARS outbreak was self limiting and so work on the vaccine was stopped because it wasn’t needed. There has been a vaccine for MERS developed and it is that vaccine that the Oxford team have repurposed for COVID.

Cornettoninja · 16/05/2020 22:39

I’ll keep the optimism I have and choose to believe the claims of scientists, who know that ‘the common cold’ isn’t one virus, have foundational research and trials from SARS and MERS to build on, the fact there are successful livestock coronavirus vaccines as well as their professional reputations on the line making such public claims, have good reason to be confident.

I’m not so confident that manufacture and a vaccination programme would be coordinated quite so quickly given the fact there will be a global demand.

jasjas1973 · 16/05/2020 22:40

Humans live for many years, farm animals don't, the testing for effectiveness and side effects for new vaccine has to be very thorough and that will take time, even if the trials are a success, possibly years before it could be released to the public

megletthesecond · 16/05/2020 22:42

No.
I think they'll have fairly robust treatments though.

Sunshinegirl82 · 16/05/2020 22:43

Oxford are hoping for an emergency licence and a million doses ready to administer by September/October if all goes to plan. Seems ambitious but if it happens it will be fantastic. I’d be wry surprised if it takes years given the focus and the unlimited funding but anything is possible.

Bluntness100 · 16/05/2020 22:45

Of course the real figure will be more like 1% because we haven't been testing everyone

Ok let’s argue over half a percent, I’ll bite. There are many global studies that show, and even Patrick Vallance said at the press conference it was likely to be a lot lower than one percent, but global studies, inc the heindenberg one, amongst many, are starting to show it’s likely to be 0.05 percent. Potentially even lower than that, and could be as low as 0.04.

And if you also do the maths, the last time I looked approx 88 percent of people who died were over 65. Which means 12 percent were below this age, as deaths in care homes have now soared it’s likely lower again still.

But the last stats I looked at a few days ago showed approx 3000 people under 65 had died in the uk.

Of those, when you drill down in the government data, 95 percent had under lying health issues, five percent were healthy.

As such approx 150 healthy people under sixty five have died.

There is no way round the stats, they are published not just by our government but many governments globally, the death rate is very low, it’s likely to be a max of 0.05 percent and a thousandth of that for healthy people under sixty five.

I really don’t understand why with all the data published people don’t bother to read it or act dismayed when they see it’s so low.

Yes the elderly and those with underlying health conditions count. And yes the death rate amongst those groups is much much higher, but across the population it is very low, as 95 percent of deaths are people who have underlying health issues and approx 90 percent of deaths are over 65.

Viviennemary · 16/05/2020 22:47

I'm past caring.

runrunrunrunt · 16/05/2020 22:52

Some posters should be banned for spreading potentially dangerous misinformation.

runrunrunrunt · 16/05/2020 22:53

1% to 0.05% isn't half a percent is it?

Toddlerteaplease · 16/05/2020 22:54

Yes. The best experts all over the world are working on it.

Eyewhisker · 16/05/2020 23:09

Possibly but as said above, having a lockdown means that it will take longer to check if it works. The trials need the volunteers to be exposed to the virus in order to check if it is effective. If there is no exposure due to social distancing it will take much longer as they can’t check whether the vaccinated aren’t infected because if the vaccine or because the virus just isn’t spreading.

In the meantime, the government expects that one third of small businesses could go bust.

Puzzledandpissedoff · 16/05/2020 23:18

it’s reasonable to assume they have very good reason to be so publicly confident

Not necessarily; given the amount of funding being flung at vaccine researchers they'd be pretty silly not to sound confident of success if they want that money to keep flowing

Then there's the possibility of resistance to a vaccine that's been developed in haste. I'm no anti-pharma activist and they do a great deal of good, but they also make a lot of mistakes; see Baycol, Vioxx, Mediator, Risperdal, Thalidomide and more

Chillipeanuts · 16/05/2020 23:20

Hope so: husband shielding so depending on it really.

feelingverylazytoday · 16/05/2020 23:30

Let's face it, no one on this thread has a fucking clue
Speak for yourself.

ChaBishkoot · 16/05/2020 23:31

As I say on these threads I can’t give much confidential information away but

  • a vaccine looks likely. It is likely the Oxford vaccine will offer some protection- reduce hospital stays and deaths for the most severe.
  • the Moderna vaccine I think is being targeted at the elderly
  • the Sanofi vaccine is a protein based one also going into clinical trials with the help of GSK. The US govt has put a lot of money into this one.

We will most likely need more than one vaccine (there are 20+ flu vaccines on the market) and certainly multiple manufacturers working at full capacity to supply the global demand.
The Oxford monkey data is...okay. It’s not as good as they had hoped for but it’s not terrible.
There is a SARS vaccine but trials were halted when the funding dried up.
It is not unlikely that a vaccine will be available for U.K. and EU healthcare workers by the end of the year.

psychomath · 16/05/2020 23:34

I think there's a good chance. Funding and global research effort is being poured into this like nothing else I can think of in all of human history, and there's no real reason to think a Sars-CoV-2 vaccine would be particularly difficult to develop. People keep bringing up HIV as a counterexample, but there are well understood reasons why we don't have an HIV vaccine - vaccines essentially work by speeding up the body's natural immune mechanism, and our immune response just doesn't work against the HIV virus, which is why no-one recovers from it. Clearly most people's immune systems can clear Sars-CoV-2, as most people recover just fine without treatment.

As for whether people would pay for a vaccine that prevents colds, maybe they would, but only about 20% of colds are caused by coronaviruses. No-one is going to pay for a vaccine that still leaves you with an 80% chance of catching a cold! And no drug company is going to spend tens of millions of pounds and months or years of effort developing one.

ChaBishkoot · 16/05/2020 23:34

Each of these vaccines will have varying levels of efficacy- if we are lucky 50-60%. There is data on how the virus is mutating and so far it doesn’t look as if it’s becoming significantly more virulent.

All of these vaccines will all go through the same trials as any other vaccine. The data will be analysed the same way. Other vaccines take time because funding and global interest in them (eg a malaria vaccine) is much more limited. This is an unprecedented global effort. My children will be having the vaccine as soon as it is commercially available for children. (And I will be having it too).