The coronavirus’s genetic code stays fairly stable as it infects more people, suggesting that a vaccine would be more effective at combating the virus.
Scientists studying the coronavirus say that it appears to be mutating slowly and that an eventual vaccine would not have to be changed much, if at all, to inoculate people against the disease, according to the Washington Post.
All viruses develop mutations as they replicate while moving through people and populations, and each mutation can make the virus more or less dangerous as well as more resistant to a certain kind of vaccine. The coronavirus’s slow mutation, if it holds, means that virologists can rely on a certain kind of vaccine longer to combat the virus before tweaking it to deal with a newly mutated form of the pathogen.
The strain of coronavirus that is spreading through the United States is four to 10 mutations different than the original strain that broke out in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December, according to Peter Thielen, a molecular geneticist at Johns Hopkins University.
“That’s a relatively small number of mutations for having passed through a large number of people,” Thielen said. “At this point, the mutation rate of the virus would suggest that the vaccine developed for SARS-CoV-2 would be a single vaccine, rather than a new vaccine every year, like the flu vaccine.”
“I would expect a vaccine for coronavirus would have a similar profile to those vaccines. It’s great news,” Thielen said.
In the meantime, President Trump has touted potential treatments for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, showed promising signs in a study by virologists in France. When partnered with antibiotic azithromycin, hydroxychloroquine cured six people of COVID-19 within six days.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has warned against trusting anecdotal evidence of a cure, such as the study of hydroxychloroquine in France. Fauci has said the best way of beating the virus, a vaccine, is at least a year away.
