The DU Lounge

The "shots" are vaccines, not treatments. If one already has Covid or the flu, vaccines are useless.

There are treatments for both flu and Covid but they are not injectable drugs.

for flu, Paxlovid for Covid are oral drugs.

It is true for retroviruses in particular with fast reproduction - and thus evolution - rates, resistant strains to vaccines develop quickly so the disease can still occur, generally in a milder form as the antibodies generated by B cells may have lower binding efficiency, but vaccines prevent disease, they do not cure it.

For treatments this can also occur. We saw this with the early protease inhibitors for AIDS, aspartyl proteases, p55 gag proteins, where resistance developed generally along single nucleotide polymorphisms (and on occasion, multiple nucleotide polymorphisms, for example the M46I/I47V/I50V mutations that showed resistance to Amprenavir).

This is not a place to spread misinformation about the difference between vaccines and treatments.