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

[DreamChaser23]

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

Also we have now been able to manage HIV as a chronic condition (with significant comorbidities) but our current treatment regime for HIV has seen the life expectancy for those with HIV rise significantly.

I hope so. Either that or a treatment.

Yes.

My daughter is a virologist and thinks there will be a vaccine soon,the entire World of virology are working on it 24/7.

The common cold is caused by a collection of hundreds of viruses, so a vaccine is way harder as it would have to be against so many. Each or them could mutate annually and need a whole new set of vaccines.....against one relatively non deadly disease. Influenza is easier to handle as is a smaller collection of subtypes. COVID is one virus. It is very achievable in 18 months. We have never focussed on one problem as 'the world' before. All of the money and brains and power want this done. That is the difference. Modernas' RNA based vaccine is the quickest and easiest, could be early next year, but will be too expensive to manufacture for the whole world so will unfortunately be for the richest, and we will wait for a traditional mass production vaccine in ~18 months.

Oxford are recruiting healthcare workers to their trial to speed up the efficacy testing, they think they will have completed that study by July/August, the production will run alongside the efficacy study so that if it works as soon as its approved it will be available. If it works is still a big if.

Have they looked at what happens of you already have the antibodies?

Yes. I have confidence in scientists and the efforts they are making globally on a vaccine are incredible.

On the point about HIV: no, we don't have a vaccine, but we do now have treatment and preventative medicines that have been game changers. And in a small silver lining, the drop in sex with new partners that has been caused by lockdown may offer the chance to stop its spread entirely in the UK, according to this article:
www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/13/covid-19-crisis-raises-hopes-of-end-to-uk-transmission-of-hiv

Yes but only basing it on confidence of scientists working on it.

Some posters should be banned for spreading potentially dangerous misinformation.

Agree - especially when they have form for it.

I think possible rather than likely. They might get lucky but sometime next year is more realistic. A vaccine is more likely than an effective treatment that is suitable for widespread general use (I have very little hope on that). This is coming from a reasonable degree of professional knowledge about the landscape.

Yes I do.

The data from the Oxford research so far looks positive. I hope they can start rolling out in September as they have suggested. Probably to HCPs and then the elderly and vulberable, fingers crossed by late winter and into the spring.

However research out of Manchester and Sweden suggest we could be closer to herd immunity than we think:

www.manchester.ac.uk/discover/news/over-25-of-the-uk-likely-to-have-had-covid-19-already/

www.google.com/amp/s/www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2020/04/sweden-ambassador-stockholm-reach-herd-immunity-200427072044548.html

So I doubt in the end that I (early 30s no existing conditions) will end up having it unless its required for travel and work/I have to pay privately as we do with typhoid, hep A and B etc.

Of course it's not guaranteed. I think we have lots of reasons to be hopeful though.

@Bluntness100 considering that around 0.14% of the entire population of New York has died of coronavirus (thanks Google) - and not everyone has even had the disease - this rather suggests that the mortality rate is higher than 0.05%

In the next 18 months, yes I think so. This year via the Oxford trial, 50/50.

What did George Bernard Shaw say "progress is made by the unreasonable (wo)man".

Throughout history and scientifically there are always breakthroughs and what we know today is the result of lots of them.

It pisses me off immensely when I start hearing 'rushed' and 'it's not possible to do X in that time frame' from people who know very little. Anything is possible when the stakes are this high and there's a singular focus.

I also think we'll find better treatments before we find a vaccine.

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.

Are you on glue? The figure you give is 1/20th of 1%, not half. If you'd said 0.5% I wouldn't have argued because that's perfectly possible.

I'd be fascinated by a study saying a CFR of 0.05% if you'd like to link?

No, I really don’t think a vaccine will be found. But I feel optimistic that better treatments will be found. Possibly treatments licensed for other conditions, I know lots of research is going on with MS drugs, both via injection & inhalation to see if they could be used to treat Covid patients.

I think there will be. A vet on another thread pointed out that there have been vaccines for corona viruses available for animals for years.

No I don't think a vaccine will be found. There may be vaccines for animals but without wanting to sound horrible, all that matters for animals is that the vaccine is effective - it doesn't matter if a few animals die (as long as it's only a small percentage and is economically worth having the vaccine).

A vaccine for humans has to be effective AND safe. The safe bit may be more difficult to achieve.

I'd be fascinated by a study saying a CFR of 0.05% if you'd like to link?

Honestly why do people do this? Do you have such a senior job in real life that people are there to do your bidding and make your life easy?

If so, I’m not your employee. If it was hard to find I’d do it. But it’s not. Just use google. You know like everyone else.

And as for the “are you on glue” please. Try to be original at least.

No idea. Having listened to positivity on R4 from people such as the head of the vaccine task force (Oxford person) I felt it could be yes.

Based on other elements that were thought to happen but then slowed down I don’t know again.

I think they would not be in discussions and doing pre production of a million doses if they didn’t think there was a significant chance the current vaccine currently under Over 1000 human trials would work. The government are notoriously cautious with this stuff, let’s face it.

Either way we will know by mid June.

I think it's highly unlikely that any vaccine will be available for everyone within 18 months. The sheer logistics of distributing it would take months and months.

I suspect they might have one within the next couple of years but then it will only be available to the very vulnerable.

No, and even if it is available, it’ll be years before everyone is vaccinated in this country. Just like the testing....In Wuhan they are mandatory testing all 11 million residents in a week. Our results take over a week sometimes, and other places take 30 minutes. We are just so slow at everything.

we have now been able to manage HIV as a chronic condition (with significant comorbidities) but our current treatment regime for HIV has seen the life expectancy for those with HIV rise significantly

It's taken decades to reach this stage, despite huge efforts to find a vaccine or cure.

However, (in the West) we have all learned to live with AIDS, the fear we all had in the 80s has been replaced with caution or in many cases, just risk management! i.e. he she doesn't look like they've got HIV.

I wonder that over time, we will come to live alongside CV-19 as we seek to restore our previous lives?
Because without a vaccine, there can't be new relationships, couples who don't live together cannot be intimate, grandparents can't hug their grandchildren.......etc etc

We are going to have to manage this new disease sooner rather than later.