In discussions in the news, here on this board, and elsewhere, it seems there is a general presupposition that we will create a successful COVID-19 vaccine. People focus on when, not if.<p>Since there is some evidence that the virus is significantly mutating (e.g. the recent report from Los Alamos), and since we do not yet have vaccines I am aware of for any other coronavirus, what makes people so confident we will be able to produce working vaccine(s) for this one?
The virus isn't mutating nearly as fast as other viruses that we are able to have somewhat decent vaccines for. And we had plenty of candidates for SARS/MERS vaccines that showed good efficacy in preclinical studies. The reason we dont have other coronavirus vaccines isn't because of the science, it's because funding for those previous vaccine programs went away once the diseases went away or didnt turn into a pandemic. Some of those same programs are being restarted now that people care about coronavirus again.<p>We also have a <i>huge</i> number of vaccine efforts, Including ones targeting regions conserved between both SARS and COVID, so something far more heavily conserved than the mutations Los alamos noted in the receptor binding domains. It's also a probability game where we have 100+ vaccines in development for a disease where there's no obvious biological reason that a vaccine wouldn't work.