Not really. There is no need to develop a vaccine, the unmodified common cold virus is harmless enough. And we know its effects.

Infection with at least some of those "common cold" human coronaviruses seems to have much the same effects on kids and the elderly (and maybe everyone else too) as Covid-19. At least part of the reason we're not seeing a huge pandemic of those is that lots of people already have immunity, but that also makes infecting people with them less useful - the people who already have immunity to those aren't likely to develop new immunity, and the people who don't presumably won't necessarily develop immunity that crosses over to Covid-19.

(Unfortunately, since common cold research is a lot less big, glamourous and high-profile than Covid-19, I don't think we know a huge amount for sure about the other human coronaviruses - and what we do know isn't exactly front-page headline news.)

I read earlier in the year... early in the news about the outbreak, a skeptical view that suggested the reason for this 'epidemic' had something to do with the relatively new ability to apply fast genetic testing to a 'fairly common cold'

edit to remove the phrases: "pandemic" & "new normal"

Doctors can’t do that ethically, but people could spread it among themselves. It’s the chickenpox-party solution. I don’t think it’s practical though given how easy it is to confuse another Coronavirus for Covid symptoms.

Deploying a coronavirus to immunize against covid is a vaccine by definition and deciding to not call it a vaccine as a matter of syntax doesn't make the ADE risk go away

Call it a vaccine or not, common cold virus don't have to be developed because they already exist.

vaccines against COVID have already been developed. They already exist. Designing them took a couple of weeks. What takes time is testing them to make sure they are safe and effective. The cold causing coronaviruses would also have to be tested for safety and efficacy in an application of preventing COVID-19. That's what the bulk of "developing" a COVID vaccine means in our modern context - testing through clinical trials. The first RNA vaccine against COVID "existed" a week after SARS-COV-2 was sequenced, and vaccines that use parts of the virus itself "existed" basically immediately after SARS-COV-2 started existing. Using the cold virus is actually a harder problem scientifically since you're using a different strain of virus to protect against SARS-COV-2 epitopes - the mechanism and safety profile is harder to predict and evaluate.

Of course we don't yet know how effective it is. But how don't we know its safety profile? Why should a cold virus be more dangerous just because we use it as a vaccine, especially if we spread it the "usual" way as opposed to injecting it?

I didnt know there was a date set for an upcoming covid-19 vaccine

There isn't, but some of the proposed vaccines are entering (or very close to entering) phase 3, while this proposed inocculation by common corona viruses would have to start at phase 1, thus being much slower.

It's silly to think we're going to have a safe vaccine on the market any time soon. It'd probably be safer to give everyone coronavirus common cold viruses if it can build an immunity.

..and Immune Enhancement Syndrome one of the serious consequences of the SARS1 and MERS vaccines that never made it past their trials.

There are a lot of factors to immunity beyond antibodies. Traditional vaccines are either close viruses in the animal world (horsepox for smallpox) or heat treated inactivated virus (flu). We know they produce anitbodies, but there are hundreds of other parts of our immune system (complement system, inane, etc.) that might interact and form memory as well.

Vaccines come out of bad places; from eras where hundreds if not thousands of people were going blind, dying or getting paralyzed by disease. It was easier to just test things on people back then too, and a lot of them died (Chinese were inoculating people with actual smallpox 300 years before Jenner discovered making a vaccine from Cowpox/horsepox).

In the 1970s, the Swing Flu vaccine was a disaster. Sure millions of people got the vaccine and were fine, but 3,000 people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome. Some still have trouble walking or smiling (see the 60 Minutes documentary from that era)

Vaccines need a lot of testing. I do not understand why we're trusting the man who gave us Windows 95 to lead the Gates/Gavi alliance responsible for giving us a "safe" vaccine in less than a year. That's insane.

The problem is that, at least in some populations, these viruses are only moderately less dangerous than COVID-19. There are recorded nursing home outbreaks (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2095096/) where a common cold coronavirus killed 5-8% of residents.

Without wanting to sound disrespectful to those affected 5-8% is pretty good for a care home.

It is, unfortunately, but it's probably bad enough that it's not something a government could deliberately do.

Would it make sense to skip those age groups? We still have social distancing in place; if we try to protect those people from sars-cov-2 they will also be protected by other milder variants we nurse in the wider population.

On a similar note: when a vaccine gets developed, does it make more sense to vaccinate those age groups (on the grounds that it will protect the most vulnerables) or to vaccinate everybody else (on the grounds that the vaccines may not be 100% safe and thus it may be safer for those age groups to benefit from the herd immunity)?

You cannot deliberately infect people of any age group anyway. I would skip it and doesn't sound more convincing than measles parties.

You mean you can't "ethically" infect people? I disagree, it just comes down to risk. Many vaccines and medications have rare but potentially severe side-effects, but we administer them anyway due to risk versus reward.

Let's say you have a 5% chance of dying from COVID-19, a 10% chance of contracting it, but only a 0.05% chance of dying from some harmless coronavirus that would reduce your chance of dying from COVID-19 by half. It would be irrational not to deliberately contract the harmless coronavirus.

The problem is just that we don't know all these variables, especially for a given individual.

A potential COVID vaccine is an example. I doubt you could ethically instruct people to get a shot for such a health experiment. You can require them to get one to use certain services, but bodily autonomy has precedence in my opinion. That is even more relevant for living pathogens.

Being together with other humans is always a health risk if you want to look at it like that. While it might be incredible stupid to not take the lesser risk, you cannot force people to be rational.

The problem with measles parties is that measles cause long term damage and not the delibirate infection.

If mild common cold can make you immune to covid19, delibirate infections may be a much more efficient way to achieve herd immunity than a propiatary vaccine.

Is the fact that the vaccine is "proprietary" relevant to the efficacy? Would a non proprietary vaccine be ok?

Of course, less money (no patents, etc), less interests and less non relevant choices being made (e.g buying endless supply of quinine because something) . Heck if actual mild cold could cause mass immunity, the cold virus is it's own distribution mechanism. No need for all the syringes and other logistics.

Of course this is all hand waving, but the point is we shouldn't automatically think that a man made vaccine is a much better solution.

> we shouldn't automatically think

Ah yes, we surely shouldn't automatically about anything. We should use reason and data.

We should, we don't. There are great forces working on making you think certain ways by emphasizing certain data, and push messages that promote certain reason making.

The more money is at stake the greater force is applied. The last few years have proven what a devastating effect it had on our ability to discuss and think reasonably about anything.

I'd assume the goal of a population-wide infection program would be to end social distancing. Otherwise it's not clear what the point would be.

Vaccine deployment won't eradicate the virus immediately, so the most at-risk populations will likely need to be personally vaccinated before they can safely stop social distancing.

Maybe, but at some point, moving your hand will kill you. You don't see 500 years olds walking around

> give everyone coronavirus common cold viruses if it can build an immunity.

> Edward Jenner, FRS FRCPE[1] (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist who was the pioneer of smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine.[2][3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Jenner

> It'd probably be safer to give everyone coronavirus common cold viruses if it can build an immunity.

I'm still a little scared by the Moderna vaccine because the mechanism for RNA vaccines is so new, and this one's being rushed out. Give a choice between that an a month of common colds, I'd take the colds.

giving everyone a cold virus is a vaccine by definition. It's a biological preparation to provide active acquired immunity. Trying to make up artificial distinctions between this and that doesn't make giving everyone the cold not a vaccine or any safer - the procedure doesn't care what you name it, a vaccine is a vaccine and a vaccine must be tested b for safety and efficacy

It's not like we stopped vaccine development in the 1970s. The HPV vaccine came out in 2006 and by all evidence so far is very safe.

> It's silly to think we're going to have a safe vaccine on the market any time soon. It'd probably be safer to give everyone coronavirus common cold viruses if it can build an immunity.

I'd say that there's a 70% chance that there's millions of doses available for North America by late January of a >50% efficacy vaccine with a high production rate from that point.

There are so many different vaccine efforts now, and so many of them producing at risk. Some will work. It's just a question of how high the efficacy is and the duration of protection.

> ..and Immune Enhancement Syndrome one of the serious consequences of the SARS1 and MERS vaccines that never made it past their trials.

A lot of us were worried about antibody dependent enhancement. But we've had basically no evidence that this is a significant concern: successful treatment with convalescent plasma, successful challenge tests with vaccines in animal models, successful monoclonal antibody therapies in animal tests, etc, all point the other way.

> Sure millions of people got the vaccine and were fine, but 3,000 people developed Guillain-Barre syndrome.

And this wasn't a good trade, because the vaccine probably saved a lot fewer than 3,000 lives. But at this point, you'd save a whole lot of lives even with a vaccine that bad. (And we're not going quite that quick that time around and we have somewhat better tools to prevent bad outcomes).

> I do not understand why we're trusting the man who gave us Windows 95 to lead the Gates/Gavi alliance responsible for giving us a "safe" vaccine in less than a year.

??? Now you've gone completely off the rails. Gavi's primary role is as a purchaser of vaccines and not in development. The couple dozen vaccine development efforts worldwide are what we can expect to yield a vaccine.

> Now you've gone completely off the rails. Gavi's primary role is as a purchaser of vaccines and not in development.

Both Gavi and the Gates Foundation are intended to create "healthy markets" for vaccines. Gates didn't design Windows 95 either; he was a business and marketing guy promoting it. It's not the development that's the issue, it's the fact that these alliances are profit motivated and vaccines have been a loosing bet for years due to the incredibly amount of research funding needed to bring one to market.

Their motives for rushing a vaccine to market right now are not altruistic. They want to prove they can bring vaccines for novel viruses to the market quickly. It could work, but it could also be a disaster. The fact that this is an 'emergency' allows them to avoid a lot of regulations, and even liability if the trials end up making people sick or killing them.

Vaccines of a new untested technology that manipulates rna that are rushed to market.

Yeah, good last resort, not first.

The mRNA vaccines are just a couple of the dozen+ credible vaccine efforts. They may win the race, they may not..

If I understand correctly, the mRNA vaccines have the added benefit that there are no existing antibodies that destroy the modified virus, like the adenovirus vaccines.

Sure, the Oxford vaccine uses an adenovirus that is not present in humans outside Africa, but when they try to make a second vaccine, based on the same adenovirus, people who took the COVID-19 vaccine might not be protected.

So while not tested, mRNA might be a much better bet for the future, because we will be able to develop vaccines much faster and not have to search for a new virus vector each time a new vaccine is developed.

mRNA would be a nice capability to have, if it doesn't kill people or cause excessive side effects.

It looks like the side effects from mRNA vaccines are bigger than a typical vaccination. It's starting to look like mRNA vaccines may not be the vaccine you'd want in the long term based on this alone. The question is, do they create high severity side effects that preclude using them in the short term? We're about to learn...

There's a lot of other efforts; adenovirus vectors, attenuated efforts, non-replicating virus efforts. Of course, the adenovirus vectors are of concern because if immunity wears off, you can't necessarily give someone a booster a couple years later.