[BinaryIdiot]

> Why develop a vaccine for a disease that is now non-existent?

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.

> SARS-COV-1 infected people for 2 years, then it was gone. There's certainly a chance that SARS-COV-2 disappears before a vaccine could make it to market.

Highly unlikely. SARS ended up infecting an order of magnitude less people _in its entire 2 year run_ than Covid-19.

We will have this virus around for at least 5+ years, possibly forever.

[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.