I just learned from this video, below, that:
"The FDA has never approved a
single viable vaccination against any coronavirus, including SARS, MERS, and the common cold. "Wow. And we're thinking we're going to actually crank one out in less than a year??? For the worst Coronavirus we've ever seen??
This is starting to remind me of the Theranos scandal, where there are a ton of investors and scientists working on a cure, when the reality is, one may never actually surface. This is a good video to watch.
What if a COVID-19 Vaccine Is Never Developed?
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COVID-19 is one of the largest and most immediate threats to human life in the modern day, with
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millions of infections and hundreds of thousands of deaths to its name.
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It seems like every day we learn frightening new facts about the disease, like its extreme
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contagiousness, or its apparent ability to cause massive strokes in some of its victims.
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But, for many there’s a light at the end of the tunnel: The COVID-19 vaccine that will
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grant us all immunity from this terrifying virus.
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But, we’re sorry to report that actually getting an effective vaccine for COVID-19
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isn’t necessarily in the cards.
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That’s right – like a lot of the most dangerous and complicated problems facing
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humanity today, the hope for a simple, silver-bullet answer to our problems might just be a futile
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and even dangerous fantasy.
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You’ll likely see countless articles about the various vaccine development projects across
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the globe, and how all of these tests are claiming to be standing on the doorstep of
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a major breakthrough.
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However, experts like Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center
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for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy, think that news like this is building dangerous
01:04
false hopes among the public.
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The idea that a vaccine will definitely be developed and available in the next several
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months has led many to underestimate the virus, both in terms of its immediate negative effects
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and its potential to infect even wider swathes of the global population.
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Even if we do get lucky and find a workable vaccine, the battle would be far from over.
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In Osterholm’s own words, “even if we had a vaccine that showed some evidence of
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protection by September, we are so far from having a vaccine in people’s arms,” as
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global development and rollout would likely be a wildly uneven nightmare.
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And even that feels optimistic compared to the possibility that a vaccine might always
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continue to evade us.
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Today, we’re going to explore that worst-case scenario: The fact we may never see an effective
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vaccine for this virus, why this might be the case, and what a future where COVID-19
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is never fully wiped out could look like.
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First, with so much seemingly positive news about vaccine development breaking every day,
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why might all of this come to nothing?
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After all, we’ve come up with successful vaccines for horrific viruses in the past,
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like Smallpox and Polio, so why not COVID-19?
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Well, this situation is a lot more complicated than most of the general public currently
02:14
understands.
02:15
The degree to which a virus is amenable to an effective vaccine has less to do with the
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symptomatic traits of the virus, and more to do with – as veteran researcher Adolfo
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García-Sastre puts it – the “specific characteristics of how the virus infects.”
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Hence why a disease as deadly as Smallpox can be conquered, and a disease as annoyingly
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simple as the common cold continues to be impossible to vaccinate against.
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Unlucky for us, all evidence currently points to COVID-19 being closer to the common cold
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on this scale than something like smallpox.
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Naturally, this is extremely concerning because the rate at which COVID-19 causes serious
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illness and even death in its victims is also far closer to smallpox.
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Researchers have found that the characteristics of COVID-19, in terms of its virulence, are
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extremely similar to that of an earlier coronavirus: SARS, which came to prominence in the early
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2000s.
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Unlike with COVID-19, SARS was caught and contained quickly, leading to it burning itself
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out after only killing 700 people, compared to COVID-19’s multiple hundreds of thousands
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deaths.
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At the time, scientists developed two different vaccines for SARS that they tested on lab
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animals, and found some extremely disturbing effects: While the vaccine did activate antibodies
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in the immune system that allowed the test subjects to respond to SARS, the antibodies
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weren’t actually enough to stop the virus from causing serious damage.
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A quick science lesson on how vaccines work: Vaccines introduce molecules of certain viral
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or sometimes bacterial pathogens – known as antigens – into the body in order to
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train the body’s immune system to recognize and fight a pathogen.
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The body already does this naturally, but this can take valuable time – time during
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which the disease can progress to dangerous levels.
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Vaccines allow the body to have the antibodies before the first infection even begins.
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This essentially nips a burgeoning pathogenic threat in the bud, unless a pathogen undergoes
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regular antigenic shift, like the flu virus or common cold.
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This means new antibodies will need to be produced for each strain of the pathogen that
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mutates.
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Rachel Roper, a professor of immunology at East Carolina University who played a part
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in those aforementioned SARS tests, believes there’s credible evidence to indicate that
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COVID-19 might just be resistant to vaccination altogether.
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And it’s not just SARS that sets the precedent for this – The FDA has never approved a
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single viable vaccination against any coronavirus, including SARS, MERS, and the common cold.
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In some ways, it would actually be more surprising to find that they could develop a vaccine
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for COVID-19.
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There’s also a common saying in scientific research circles “mice lie, and monkeys
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don’t tell the truth.”
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Meaning that results discovered in animals aren’t always generalizable to human subjects
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– so even promising results in mice don’t necessarily mean those same results will carry
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over to humans.
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Researchers like Roper have also highlighted the possibility that rushing into a bad vaccine
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could be far worse than not having any vaccine at all.
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Experts have pointed to past horror stories like Dengvaxia, a 2016 vaccine for the notoriously
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vaccine resistant dengue-fever that was used on around 800,000 Filipino schoolchildren,
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and had some disastrous results.
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Authorities looked into the deaths of 600 of these children, all of which were possibly
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killed by a phenomenon known as “immune enhancement.”
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This is when, due to poor design and testing, a vaccine does the opposite of what it was
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intended to do and instead of helping the body, it makes the infection worse.
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This is because, in the event of immune enhancement, the antibodies actually help the virus progress
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further through the body rather than preventing it.
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While instances like this are relatively rare – and definitely shouldn’t be used as
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proof by anti-vaxxing soccer moms who are in the process of bringing back measles – but
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it’s still a risk worth considering before anyone tries to rush in with a half-baked
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vaccine plan.
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However, while a badly-made vaccine could be calamitous, vaccines that only work for
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a relatively short period of time could still be useful, as they may at least slow some
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of the spread of the virus.
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While it’s become clear that some countries have most likely been hiding or misreporting
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the true extent of their infections, antibody data coming out of China has raised some more
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cause for vaccine concern.
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Patients who recovered from the virus showed a low antibody count, meaning that people
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who’ve caught the virus in the past, or get vaccinated for it, are at risk of getting
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infected again either way – though scientists will need more data on this before making
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any conclusive observations.
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Christopher Whitty, the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, also shared some pretty grim tidings
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as a result of his team’s research.
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He said there’s been “concerning” evidence that it may be impossible, artificially or
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otherwise, to stimulate long-term immunity from the virus, seeming to corroborate the
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results of the Chinese data.
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He does offer a small glimmer of hope in this, saying it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s
06:54
no chance for a somewhat effective vaccine.
06:56
However, it does cast some serious doubt on whether a lifelong vaccine for COVID-19 could
07:01
ever be developed.
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You may be tempted to think, “Well, look at the rate that COVID-19 is infecting and
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killing people.
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Surely that would be effective motivation to develop a vaccine as soon as possible,
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with the world’s united resources.”
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But once again, historical precedent steps in to dash these overly optimistic hopes.
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HIV was first officially discovered and named in 1984, and in the several decades since,
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it’s killed over 32 million people.
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Still no vaccine, in spite of the devastating human toll and the billions of dollars spent
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on research over the years.
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Scientists have had similar difficulties creating an effective vaccine for adenoviruses and
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rhinoviruses, which can have similar symptomatic effects to coronaviruses like COVID-19.
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Of course, none of these viruses are exactly the same as COVID-19 in terms of its virulence
07:47
and its rate of mutation – the two deciding factors in the effectiveness of a vaccine.
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But it does stand to prove an important point: We’ve had high hopes for different vaccine
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development plans in the past, only to be brutally disappointed by the outcomes.
08:00
In the grand scheme of things, we’re still in the very early days of COVID-19, and as
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more data about the disease trickles in over time, we’ll gain a better understanding
08:09
of what exactly we’re dealing with here.
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So that’s why we may not be able to count on a COVID-19 vaccine to swoop down like superman
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and save the day, now the real question is: What does this actually mean for all of us?
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If we’re not all biding time for the development of a vaccine here, what’s the endgame for
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our global fight against the disease?
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Well, we must once again turn to history for this.
08:29
The groups of experts who’ve cautioned against putting all of our eggs inside the vaccine
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basket have instead suggested a set of sweeping societal reforms that would allow us to adapt
08:38
to the presence of COVID-19.
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David Nabarro, professor of global health at Imperial College, has said that figuring
08:45
out ways to work around the constant threat of the virus through individual choices and
08:49
government legislation is really the only Anti-COVID-19 method we can truly rely on.
08:54
This is referred to as “Plan B”, with Plan A being the expression for the traditional
08:59
vaccine path to ending the current global crisis.
09:02
Take the aforementioned HIV/AIDS pandemic that’s been raging since the early eighties.
09:07
Thanks to impressive developments in antiviral drugs, HIV is no longer the absolute death
09:11
sentence it used to be – with many HIV positive people living long and fulfilling lives.
09:17
The creation of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP (Narrator note: pronounced “prep”),
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medication has also gone a long way in preventing further infections in the absence of a viable
09:24
vaccine.
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While some research teams race to find a potential vaccine for COVID-19, others race to find
09:30
useful antiviral drugs for treating patients currently suffering from the disease.
09:34
If a cheap and effective antiviral drug was found, it could circumvent the vaccine issue
09:40
by massively reducing the severity of the cases, if not the overall number.
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You’ve probably heard a number of options paraded as “miracle cures” in the news
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– from the Hydroxychloroquine championed by US President Donald Trump, to the anti-Ebola
09:53
drug remdesivir, to experimental blood plasma treatments.
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Of course, all of these are essentially shots in the dark at the moment, and anyone trying
10:00
to tell you otherwise is more than likely trying to sell you something.
10:04
At the time of this writing, in late May, 2020, there are no consistently effective
10:08
antiviral drugs approved for the treatment of COVID-19.
10:12
On the upside, if any of the antiviral drugs being tested to treat COVID-19 do turn out
10:17
to be effective, we should find this out in the coming weeks, as randomized antiviral
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drug trials are an exponentially faster process than vaccine testing.
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However, it’s still worth asking: What if our saviour doesn’t come in the form of
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antiviral drugs, either?
10:31
What does a world without vaccines and antiviral drugs for COVID-19 look like?
10:35
It’s likely that the world may, in time, return to some semblance of a new normal.
10:40
While a truly extensive lockdown would be the most effective way to let COVID-19 burn
10:44
itself out – think the course of the SARS infection, just on a much wider scale – it
10:49
would also likely lead to global economic collapse.
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Therefore, what most experts recommend is a slow easing of containment procedures in
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several months’ time, but only if buttressed by regular mass testing to detect and stomp
11:01
out pockets of the virus before they can become epidemics.
11:04
This new way of living would also be built around the idea that lockdowns can restart
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at any time if deemed necessary, so it’s likely periods of quarantine would come in
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fits and starts for years to come in order to minimize damage.
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This new normal would also feature a certain degree of social distancing as standard, changes
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to social norms like the elimination of shaking hands, and the expectation of a constant state
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of caution and vigilance.
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Of course, it’s worth noting that, when all is said and done, many experts still believe
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that creating a viable vaccine for COVID-19 is a strong possibility – and the debate
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of whether COVID-19 is vaccine resistant or not is a contentious one, that will require
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more data from cases and studies to truly answer.
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However, even if – in the best-case scenario – we do manage to create a workable vaccine
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and accompanying antiviral treatments, we’ll all be better off for exercising the caution
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and consideration that comes with knowing just how bad the worst-case scenario can truly
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be.
12:00
Now go check out “What Is It Actually Like to Have COVID-19?” and “COVID-19 (Coronavirus)
12:05
Long Term Health Impacts”
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