Link to paper: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9403" rel="nofollow">https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abe9403</a><p>Already the authors list is very impressive. Lots of people!
No.<p>>The problem sparks when a viral strain, normally happily living in a bat, pig, or rodent<p>That's the rub right there. One of the reasons we were successful with smallpox is there wasn't an animal reservoir. One virus + no animal reservoirs + good vaccine = can be successful. Multiple known viruses and strains with multiple reservoirs and no good vaccines means this will not happen.<p>More to the point, this isn't really what the paper was looking at all. The actual (OA) publication[1] identified common and conserved areas which could potentially be used to study and target viruses throughout out the family. This might help with human SARS-CoV2 therapeutics, but it's main benefit is showing how molecular analyses will help fight future coronaviruses.<p>It does not ask or answer whether we can "engineer a universal vaccine against the entire viral family" nor did it "[draw] up a scientific recipe to potentially end coronaviruses once and for all."<p>1: <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/14/science.abe9403" rel="nofollow">https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/10/14/scie...</a>
Currently it seems to me that the bottleneck for developing the vaccines is the time of trials. Hopefully we’ll have approved DNA / RNA vaccines in less than a year with less side effects than previous vaccines. When that happens, I guess our response time as a species for viruses can get better as well.
Everyone who is answering in the negative here, no matter how sincere and what efforts they are making to discuss this rationally is getting downvoted. A. Why? Can we not act like this? B. Off topic, but whoever thought the downvote button was a good idea? It will always be a disagree/spite you button...wherever you find such a thing. It doesn't help. It never helps. Flag flagrant bad actors for mods to address, discuss anything else like adults.
When it comes to our bio-ecosystem, I'm repelled by this kind of a question as, in general, I don't believe we understand ecosystems with complex interacting parts well at all .. and are therefore not well placed to make such sweeping changes to it .. at least not consciously.<p>The seminal book on this (for me) has been Dietrich Dörner's "The Logic of Failure".
We can’t even wipe out mosquitos. Just tweeted this:<p>> We lost the “War on Terror”, we lost the “War on Drugs”, and as long as we keep declaring war on fundamental forces of nature, we will keep losing. The only way to win is not to play.