“Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?”

Yesterday I was scrolling through a feed of TED talks when one title struck me — “Can we create vaccines that mutate and spread?”. I was impressed by author’s perspective I never had in my mind. If it didn’t eureka you yet, let me explain what I mean.

I was born into the world with vaccines. It was a reality of my life to get vaccinated as a kid against many different deseases, and keep getting revaccinated against flu as adult. Because it’s so engraved in my life since childhood I didn’t question whether there was another way of fighting against the deseases.

Cornovirus pandemic brought a lot of attention to the topic. We learnt that it takes relatively long time to develop a new vaccine, year or more with an expedited process. There is no guarantee that the virus won’t mutate by the moment vaccine is developed. Also, we need to vaccinate 70% of population to get a herd immunity. That’s whopping 4 billions doses! They need to be produced and distributed across the world. That’s a big manifacturing and logistical problem.

When we faced with a problem one way to look for a solution is to find how it was solved before us, in efficiently enough way. Well, viruses we trying to fight are pretty good at production (read ‘manufacuring’) and distribution (read ‘spreading’). And they also doing well inmutating (read ‘develope a new vaccine’). So can we learn and use the same process as viruses do, by developing vaccine-viruses which can naturally be produced in humans and spread between them. Would it be safe or safer in comparison to tradinitonal vaccines?

That’s an amazing questions to work on. Here you can listen from a person does work on it https://www.ted.com/talks/leor_weinberger_can_we_create_vaccines_that_mutate_and_spread. Let me know what you think.