LogFAQs > #952617124

zebatov posted...

Yeah I dont even understand that. Shouldnt it be just one vaccine for the one virus?

Not remotely. Existing vaccines vary widely in how they deliver the information that triggers an immune response, including viral fragments, dead viruses, attenuated viruses, and the occasional live virus one (though those are pretty uncommon). In turn, you get some variation in the other contents of the vaccine based on what's needed to preserve the viral material and promote the strongest immunity the vaccine can. When it comes to existing vaccines, there's generally only one kind on the market for each disease because there's been enough time to determine which variety works best and focus on that.

In the case of Covid, these vaccines are being produced in response to an emergency. Many different companies have been trying many different strategies to produce a functional vaccine, and a sizable variety of those strategies have ended up working well enough to be worth producing. Even once they go to production, though, an enormous number of doses are needed, but a given production facility isn't necessarily going to be able to produce more than one or two varieties. That means, even if one turns out to be the best option, there's still going to be a need to produce the next best one (which, if it's gone to production, is still going to be perfectly functional) in order to fill the massive demand.

Basically, everybody's made a bunch of different vaccines, but nobody's able to make enough of theirs to get some to everyone in the world, so they're all sharing the market. All of the approved vaccines work and do not pose a significant risk of severe side effects (otherwise they wouldn't have passed the approval process), there's just neither the time nor the production capacity to identify and preferentially distribute an optimal one.

zebatov posted...

I understand there are different brands of medicines, but they are typically for different things.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Consider Tylenol, Advil, and Aspirin: Different drugs, all used as low-grade painkillers. They each have their specialties that they excel at compared to the others, and different people will find that one works better than the others, but there's still a market for all three. Think of choosing a Covid vaccine like treating a headache with one of those: If you're allergic to one, take a different one. If one works particularly well for you (or your demographic, in the case of the vaccines), you're going to be best off taking that one, but if you don't have any of it handy, it'll be better to take one of the others than to go without.

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