[gpderetta]

> I think the idea here is since both SARS and Covid-19 are part of the coronavirus type, a vaccine for SARS would make modification and rapid deployment of a Covid-19 vaccine significantly better. Really, any existing coronavirus vaccine would have helped research efforts tremendously.

do we know that's the case? It seems to me that the bottleneck is testing, which need to be done specifically for each vaccine.

[BinaryIdiot]

I've only heard a few interviews where various doctors or scientists have said this is the case but I'm no expert.

[K0SM0S]

As I understand it, (not an expert myself)

- Sars-1 and Sars-2 (COVID-19) are related enough to bear the same name, thus having researched a virus for the former would be incredibly informating to finding a virus for the latter.

- As it stands, we know so little in that regard that we do not know if there is a possible vaccine for COVID-19. If I take an average between 3-10 years (the range of guesstimates floating around in some circles apparently), that's 2026-7 to have a definitive answer on that (it also depends a lot on the behavior of the virus, and we are only 10 weeks into this mess, we just don't know).

- human testing on Sars-1 may have been impossible or rather unethical, but models on animal species are just about the way we do it for everything all the time, so having a 15-year body of research + associated datasets would have been the reasonable, cautious thing to do. Having a vaccine for e.g. mice on Sars-1 available now would help a lot.

- There is no valid reason to have stopped Sars-1 vaccine research, especially given the fact that numerous experts were certain that new coronaviruses would cross again to the human race in the future (this is still true today).

- Because of all this, we are now forced to rush tests on "best guesses" for vaccines, with nowhere near enough data to make a really "educated" guess, far from the usual. Meaning, increased risk to the patients in those trials, but most dramatically for all: we have cornered ourselves into making moonshots in a hurry in the quest for a vaccine.

There is a possibility that we've gotten so good at molecular biology and modelling that we'll actually overcome these obstacles that we've created for ourselves, but the gist is that had we been a little more forward-thinking (including hoarding stocks for medical supplies, etc), the ultimate death count could have been orders of magnitude smaller, possibly anecdotal.

[bluGill]

There is a valid reason to stop Sars-1: the researchers working on that could go on other other things. On hindsight we know differently, but there was no reason to expect this even 6 months ago.

Up until late January I was saying I want a vaccine for the common cold which was more impact on my life and something these researchers could switch to. (I'd like a better treatment to prevent heart attacks even more, but it is unlikely the researchers could switch)

[K0SM0S]

> “there was no reason to expect this even 6 months ago.”

You might want to re-think that perception.

I've recently heard Ralph Baric, an epidemiology Professor from UNC School of Medicine[0]. He's arguably one of the world's foremost experts on the topic — which makes it easy to at least listen to the man, you'd think... Have a look at his publications:

- Dec 2015 ⇒ A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence.[1]

- Mar 2016 ⇒ SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence.[2]

Few sentences from the abstract of the latter:

> Outbreaks from zoonotic sources represent a threat to both human disease as well as the global economy. Despite a wealth of metagenomics studies, methods to leverage these datasets to identify future threats are underdeveloped. [...] Focusing on the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like viruses, the results indicate that the WIV1-coronavirus (CoV) cluster has the ability to directly infect and may undergo limited transmission in human populations.

I mean... What more is there to say?

You may listen to a (great but rather technical) podcast[3] featuring him, among other experts, and there's even a layman-friendly companion post made by a listener[4] (whom I fully credit and thank for sharing the knowledge).

____

[0]: https://www.med.unc.edu/microimm/directory/ralph-baric-phd-1...

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26552008

[2]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26976607

[3]: http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-591/

[4]: https://medium.com/@hpcngmoh/you-will-be-hard-pressed-to-fin...