Question

With all that you know about SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19, discuss a possible evolutionary scenario for SARS-CoV-2 , over the next 6 months, 1 year and 5 years. How, if at all, will the virulence/trasmissability of SARS-CoV-2 change and why? A vaccine was developed for Polio, but, so far, not for HIV. Will science develop an effective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Generally viruses have a tendency to mutate.

Covid is having an evolutionary history from SARS COV-2. This evolution is probably due to mutations over time.

Mutations have been taking place from the recognition of virus for the first time till now, so their are a few changes in the virus. This is published in the studies at North Italy, they stated virus is becoming weaker from the time it has arrived till now. This is weaker in terms of symptoms presented in patients. They say this change is seen due a decreased viral load in patients. But nothing is clearly documented with scientific evidence.

In the next 6 months we can not expect a lot of change in the virus, because these mutation may take years to occur. So in the next 1 to 5 years their will a change in the virus structure and hence in its virulence.

IPV is the vaccine for polio it is inactive polio vaccine, has inactivated polio virus which is providing immunity against the disease.

When it comes to HIV a successful vaccine is still not made beacuse of a lot of reasons like

✓ The virus mutates so fast that the vaccine can not target it.

✓ vaccines are made to mimic immune response.

✓ killed virus is not effective to produce a immune reposnse. And we can not take risk of administering inactive virus.

Covid

Yes hopefully we can bring a successful vaccine to prevent covid, beacuse we have the s protein on the surface which is used as a platform to produce a vaccine. A number of vaccine are prepared based on this and other platforms like the replicating coral vector etc. These vaccines are sent for clinical trails.