What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine

Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by entropicdrifter on Thursday April 30, 2020 @02:41PM (#23034476)

It's kind of irrelevant, timing-wise. If other varieties of coronavirus are anything to go by, it's likely that people's immunity will fade in something like 12-18 months and we'll get another round of this (albeit more localized based on where the cases peaked 12-18 months before) if a vaccine isn't available yet.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by ksk on Thursday April 30, 2020 @06:02PM (#23036721)

Well, if fighting off the disease doesn't produce long term immunity, then neither will a vaccine. I guess we'll either have to keep-up with booster doses, and hope for the best that the the virus doesn't mutate enough to not be neutralized by the given vaccine.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by FuckButtons on Friday May 01, 2020 @02:50AM (#23039651)

I feel reasonably confident about vaccine efficacy, I suspect the reason this thing is so bad is because of the binding affinity of its spike protein. If that mutates, it will become less lethal so waning vaccine efficacy becomes less of an issue.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by ksk on Friday May 01, 2020 @03:50PM (#23045848)

Well, even if it mutates in a way that is beneficial (to us), you still have the original strain which will continue to spread unabated without a vaccine. It was just a handful of people who were infective initially, and now the diseases has spread everywhere. It can still happen again.

Also, for diseases that are considered "eradicated" because we now have a vaccine, if you are one of the insane anti-vax people and stop giving vaccines to your kids you can still have outbreaks because of natural reservoirs for the disease. (For e.g. measles outbreak in the state of Washington). Infectious diseases rarely just go away completely.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by brewdad on Friday May 01, 2020 @02:40AM (#23039621)

Any idea whether a COVID-19 vaccine can be added to the annual flu shot cocktail or are we going to be asking folks to get vaccinated twice each year? If 2 vaccines, can they be given at the same time or would we need to space them out for a period?

Probably too soon to know for certain but could add to the challenges of attaining and maintaining herd immunity.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by ksk on Friday May 01, 2020 @04:05PM (#23045988)

There are multiple COVID vaccines in play, and they use different technologies. Assuming you have a choice, it would depend on which of those you're administering. But yes, it is certainly possible. There already exist combination vaccines like MMR, DPT, etc

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by DarthGhandi on Thursday April 30, 2020 @06:11PM (#23036818)

> If other varieties of coronavirus

What other varieties? SARS and MERS are some significant coronaviruses, both died out long before there was a vaccine.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by SpicyLemonZest on Thursday April 30, 2020 @06:25PM (#23036950)

The endemic ones that cause colds.

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Re:What you need to know about the Covid-19 vaccine by DarthGhandi on Friday May 01, 2020 @08:54PM (#23048086)

The vast majority of viruses that cause the common cold are rhinoviruses.

Regardless, no one has produced a vaccine for anything that causes the common cold.

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