Several months ago, some people argued that trying to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 was pointless, because the “common cold” includes several types of coronaviruses, which have never had a successful vaccine.
Now that we have multiple successful vaccines for COVID-19, could we use the same methods to produce a vaccine for the common cold?
Five minutes of research suggests to me that it would be worth it to try. (Caveat: I picked the first numbers I found from Google, and I haven’t double-checked these.)
The common cold costs $40 billion per year in the US alone, after including the cost of lost productivity: Cost of the Common Cold: $40 Billion (webmd.com). (Article from 2003, but I don’t imagine this has changed significantly.)
The US government contributed $9 billion to developing COVID-19 vaccines: How Much Will It Cost to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine? (healthline.com). As I understand it, that includes both the costs of funding the research and, at least in some cases, pledging to buy hundreds of millions of doses.
Spending $9 billion to save $6 billion per year (15% of $40 billion, assuming all types of colds have roughly the same severity) sounds like a good deal to me. And chances are that the cost of development could be much lower in a non-emergency situation, since we don’t need so much redundancy.
Several months ago, some people argued that trying to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 was pointless, because the “common cold” includes several types of coronaviruses, which have never had a successful vaccine.
Now that we have multiple successful vaccines for COVID-19, could we use the same methods to produce a vaccine for the common cold?
Five minutes of research suggests to me that it would be worth it to try. (Caveat: I picked the first numbers I found from Google, and I haven’t double-checked these.)
The common cold costs $40 billion per year in the US alone, after including the cost of lost productivity: Cost of the Common Cold: $40 Billion (webmd.com). (Article from 2003, but I don’t imagine this has changed significantly.)
The US government contributed $9 billion to developing COVID-19 vaccines: How Much Will It Cost to Get a COVID-19 Vaccine? (healthline.com). As I understand it, that includes both the costs of funding the research and, at least in some cases, pledging to buy hundreds of millions of doses.
Coronaviruses cause around 15% of cases of the common cold: Common cold—Wikipedia.
Spending $9 billion to save $6 billion per year (15% of $40 billion, assuming all types of colds have roughly the same severity) sounds like a good deal to me. And chances are that the cost of development could be much lower in a non-emergency situation, since we don’t need so much redundancy.
This article makes it sound like the main difference is that we’ve never tried mRNA vaccines before: Fact-checking Facebook post comparing COVID-19 vaccine research to HIV, cancer, common cold—HoustonChronicle.com. But now that we know it works, I don’t see what’s stopping us.
looks like we’re getting an mrna vaccine for HSV out of all this, so there’s that.
Can you elaborate? Where can I read about it?
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1008795