The smallpox vaccine is 95% effective. The pertussis (Whooping Cough) vaccine is 80% effective. No vaccine is 100% effective. Four doses of the polio vaccine is the closest, but still imperfect. Some people are just susceptible to infection for whatever biological, medical, or genetic reason.
With Influenza, there are multiple viruses that cause it, and each of them rapidly mutates. Current flu vaccines take months to manufacture, so they have to make educated guesses about which flu viruses will be active in the US next season. Manufacturing for the fall flu season begins around March. The new mRNA platform should provide a huge helping hand here since there’s nothing to culture (”grow”). So they should be able to wait until right before flu season, see what’s actually active, and rapidly produce a flu shot that exactly matches it. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we saw a flu shot that’s 95% effective within the next 3 years.
The “common cold” is actually just a set of symptoms produced by any one of over 200 different viruses from multiple families. Creating a vaccine for the common cold would mean creating a vaccine for all those different viruses. And since many of them change year to year, you’d need a new shot every year. And given the size and scope of monitoring all those viruses, sequencing them, testing vaccine candidates against each of them, and combining all that into a shot, you’re probably talking $30,000 a year to do it. No technical reason you couldn’t, but are you prepared to spend $30,000 a year to avoid getting a cold?
Neither is anyone else. Hence, no market for a cold vaccine. Hence, no cold vaccine.
Right, I get that - the 90%+ effective is more than good enough for diseases that have been largely eradicated over time. Herd immunity. Even those “Anti-Vaxx” folks are probably OK, they are taking (selfish ...) advantage of the dearth of circulating viruses and the large cohort of herd immune people.
What’s interesting is to see the Schizophrenics On Acid word salad the officials are putting out there for public consumption. In the same way it is intolerable to say, have the TSA single out Granny in a wheelchair, to crawl up her ass ass with a microscope at the airport for “Homeland Security” purposes, while at the same time hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants from golly knows where pour across undefended, unsecured borders,
None of these people have been vaccinated. N.b. we’re not just talking about the Covid-19, they haven’t necessarily been vaccinated for ANYTHING, Polio, TB, Ebola, Smallpox, you name it.
If the government were honest and forthright about this, transparent, we could take them seriously. Unsecured borders with millions of sick indivuduals streaming across. Put on planes, and sprinkled far and wide to cities and towns across America. Who the &@$k are they kidding!??
But they tell me I gotta wear a dust mask in my house?? LOL!! I can’t believe anything they say, they squandered their credibility over decades, and have left millions of Americans confused, frightened, and outraged over their incompetence, if not outright homicidal behahavior.
“Not a prescription for confidence going forward.”