Ask HN: Why are people certain a vaccine with be found for Coronavirus?
Significant progress was made towards vaccines for other diseases closely related to Coronavirus such as SARS and MERS before funding dried up. While a SARS vaccine probably wouldn&#x27;t be effective against Covid-19, there&#x27;s no reason a priori to assume covid-19 has some special quality that makes it substantially more difficult to develop a vaccine for.<p>HIV resists attempts to produce a vaccine because of its high mutation rate. There are too many strains out there for one vaccine to ever be effective and no guarantee that new strains won&#x27;t pop up. Had HIV been caught and contained early on, a vaccine cocktail could probably have been developed that would be effective, but now you&#x27;d still have to worry about any HIV positive person having a strain you are not vaccinated against and thus would have to take the same protective measures.<p>Covid-19 has been mutating slowly thus far, so there is good reason to believe that if a vaccine is developed, it would be effective. It is possible and even probable that covid will remain endemic in some regions, particularly those with poor healthcare systems, and thus new strains will have time to emerge. We thus may need new vaccines for seasonal strains, similar to the flu, but still it will be much more manageable.<p>At the end of the day though, a vaccine may not be necessary for life to go back to something close to normal. The US already has about 1.3 million community spread pneumonia cases per year on average which has a substantially higher mortality rate and we get along just fine. The issue with Covid was that we were unprepared for it - hospitals did not have adequate amounts of supplies and equipment to handle the sudden spike in admitted patients. This leads to worse outcomes for those who catch the disease and extreme measures to limit the rate the disease spreads. If all the hospitals already had tons of extra ventilators lying around and if everyone already had face masks at home and if businesses already had adequate plans for sick leave in place then this outbreak would have been a mild inconvenience. While we obviously can&#x27;t go back in time, we will be prepared moving forward.