It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine. Look to the 1970s and Swing Flu to see an example of a failed vaccine. It is absolutely insane that anyone is seriously considering we can make a safe vaccine for this in less than a year.

Pharmaceutical companies have never made a successful vaccines for coronaviruses before. I've heard the argument, "Well we have more people working on it." If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month. There is no way, no matter how much money you throw at it, to safely do 5~10 years worth of testing in less than a year.

Indeed, you'd think in HN of all places, everyone should be familiar with the concept of the "mythical man month".

You just replied to a strawman argument made by someone you seem to agree with. Why?

> I've heard the argument

That was a beautiful strawman, and even one of the replies your comment walked right into it.

There aren't many human coronaviruses circulating to begin with. And they're not dangerous, aside from SARS-CoV-2. Of course there aren't any vaccines for them. Got pretty close on SARS & MERS before they fizzled on their own.

> It takes 5 to 10 years to create a safe and effective vaccine

How long do you think the leading SARS-CoV-2 vaccines have been in development? Years. It's not like they were dreamed up since February.

The SARS vaccine was likely successful. SARS died out and so the vaccine was never fully challenged in a pandemic. But as far as I know antibodies lasted a long time.

No they didn't. SARS1 and MERS vaccines had a ton of problems, such as Imuenopathic responses and Immune Enhancement syndrome.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/

https://www.pnas.org/content/117/15/8218

> If you hire nine women, you can't make a baby in a month

Absurd argument. You can't parallelize the birth of a baby but you can do that for testing a vaccine.

How? The whole point of phase 3 clinical trials is long term observation. Have you figured out how to parallelize the passing of time so that it goes by quicker?

What? You'd just run your phase 1 (safety) in parallel with phase 2/3 (efficacy)?

So basically dose tens of thousands of people before you even know it's safe?

A vaccine will be nice to have but it won't be sufficient to eradicate the virus. Some people won't be vaccinated. No vaccine is 100% effective. And there are animal reservoirs; we obviously can't vaccinate wild animals.

We don't get 100% vaccination on any disease, but we have eradicated a few and all but eradicated a bunch. We just need something approximating herd immunity levels. Those who want vaccinations will get them, the rest can slowly add to the total until society as a whole is no longer worried about coronavirus.

>Some people won't be vaccinated.

Not just some, but surveys show something like 40% of Americans say they won't take it

If we really get that level of abstention, then maybe it would be a good idea after all to give people who test positive for antibodies some kind of way to prove it.