It seems that the DoD have actually been working on, and trialling, that "generic coronavirus vaccine" idea and reckon they are close:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/worl ... 80687.html
Basically, the mRNA vaccines essentially use, ironically enough, a similar strategy to viruses themselves.US Army claims it is close to developing vaccine against all Covid variants and coronaviruses
Army-developed SpFN vaccine completed phase 1 of human trials earlier this year
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The institute said it took longer than expected for human trials because the vaccine had to be tested on people who had neither been inoculated nor infected with Covid to know its efficacy.
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The [Walter Reed] research institute said it was focused on the “longer game” to understand how the viruses mutate and not only the original emergence of SARS.
Viruses insert RNA / DNA into your cells and make your cells do the work of creating proteins, to make more copies of the virus. That is, the virus gives your cells "fake instructions" to make more virus.
The mRNA vaccines essentially take the same approach of providing your cells "instructions" - messenger RNA - which your cells then produce.
So, with the Covid vaccines, they've isolated, from the virus, the RNA it uses to produce its "spike" and then that's what you're injected with. So your cells produce the proteins to make a "spike" (but it's only the spike, and nothing else from the virus, so it's harmless and doesn't do anything, except prompt your immune system to respond to the "invasion" and wipe it out).
But, well, this mRNA technique is more generic than just that. For obvious reasons, all the main research has been on developing a vaccine specifically for Covid-19, but the mRNA technique holds more promise than just that.
And it seems that, in the background, the Walter Reed institute - the DoD's biomedical research people - has been working on the potential game-changer. Instead of making a very specific vaccine for the Covid spike protein, why not grab the RNA for something that's common to all coronaviruses?
Don't chase the individual mutations, but rather find something that's more fundamental to the whole class of coronavirus and then work on a vaccine for that. To create a generic vaccine for all coronaviruses. Not just Covid-19 and all its variants, but the common cold is also a coronavirus too.
Instead of focusing on just the "spike" protein, focus on some other aspect of coronaviruses in general that makes a coronavirus a coronavirus. Some universal generic property that they all share... and then create a vaccine against that.
Perhaps you can see how, if this works, it's truly game-changing. We stop chasing after individual variants, and we focus on knocking out whole classes of virus in one go.
If we can make this work - that's a big "if", of course - then we've got a brand new weapon in the fight against all disease.
Because, yeah, the mRNA technique isn't only applicable to viruses. You could also take on many other diseases - such as, perhaps, cancer - because what we've got is a general mechanism to give the body "instructions" to produce proteins (and, like, everything in the body and how it works pretty much boils down to proteins, as they're the building blocks of living things).
And the irony is that we've stolen this idea from viruses. Viruses "hijack" our cells to make copies of themselves. The mRNA technique is about directly giving our cells the "messenger RNA" to make these proteins. We're directly injecting "instructions" for the cells to carry out. So if we can work out what proteins we need, then we can just inject the "instructions" for making it directly into someone's arm, and then leave the body / immune system to do all the work.
Where viruses inject the "instructions" of "make more viruses" into our cells, we can inject the "instructions" of "make this harmless version of the virus". But, conceivably - and this is what Walter Reed have been working on - you could insert "instructions" for "this is something that all coronaviruses have". A generic property of them all. And then you're priming the immune system not just for one particular spike protein, but for any type of coronavirus at all. Even the ones that don't exist yet.
Give the immune system more generic "instructions" for dealing with any and all coronaviruses, not just the specific Covid variant we're worried about right now.
So, the silver lining of all this is that it's focused funding and research on this new technique - and then "mass tested" it on a scale of billions now* - which could prove game-changing for future medicine, now that we've basically got a technique for directly injecting "protein instructions" into people's arms.
(*That was a thing I heard from anti-vaxxers. That the vaccines are "experimental". Look, initially, of course they were. Because, like, until you actually jab people, you can't know if it'll work or not. But, at this point, to call these vaccines "experimental" is dumb. They've been injected into billions of arms. This probably makes it one of the most tested vaccines / medicines in all of human history by now. So, you know, anti-vaxxers need to update their arguments. Time passes. You can't keep calling it "experimental" forever.)
