- Registrado
- 2 de Ene, 2017
If you became immune to every cold that's out there, permanently, it would be less widespread. Cold viruses include some families that mutate quickly and can reinfect people a year later, so there's no "natural" immunity to them.
Herd immunity with vaccines would be possible if the cold viruses were limited in number and did enough damage to cause millions of deaths a year. The money would be there for the research. It isn't there because the viruses are very low impact.
Influenza can leave you open to reinfection and it's much more serious, so we have developed a vaccine for the common strains. Again, if it was taken seriously and vaccination was universal, yearly, we would get herd immunity to it.
Herd immunity through vaccination is how measles and polio became rare diseases, although many are trying to break that, and now there are outbreaks sometimes among crunchy woo families and weird fundamentalist sects.
Rabies and tetanus are making their comebacks too, luckily they're just fatal to the carrier, and harder to transmit person-to-person.
Coronaviruses are capable of fast mutation when given enough hosts, so reinfection is common and expected if one becomes widespread.
