Why haven’t scientists bred immune-weakened birds or monkeys to test the longterm cost/benefit of vaccine?
Can you specify what you mean by 'immune-weakened birds or monkeys' and what experiments you'd like to run?
Generally speaking, gene editing monkeys is very rare and not done as a routine matter of course. The resources required put it outside the reach of the vast majority of academic labs. Birds are even less-researched than monkeys or other mammalian animal models by several orders of magnitude. They are also very, very rarely used for research in the way you're describing, have very significant differences in their immune systems relative to mammals, and are probably inappropriate for what is my best guess at the experiment you want to do. Gene editing of mice or cell lines is done routinely, so more or less anything you can think of genetically is possible. I would guess that your best bet on this front is probably still epidemiological data.
At this point, doing any efficacy studies on the vaccine is very difficult. It's better than being COVID-19 naive (i.e. never infected), but there are virtually none of those people left in most countries of the world. If your comparison is previously infected vs. vaccinated there (as far as I'm aware) doesn't seem to be a meaningful difference in outcomes. This may change if they update the vaccines to actually target the variants people are being infected with.
I still haven't seen any convincing data for safety concerns with the mRNA vaccines, minus the extremely rare myocarditis/anaphylaxis after vaccination or the development of anti-PEG antibodies.
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Notes -
Can you specify what you mean by 'immune-weakened birds or monkeys' and what experiments you'd like to run?
Generally speaking, gene editing monkeys is very rare and not done as a routine matter of course. The resources required put it outside the reach of the vast majority of academic labs. Birds are even less-researched than monkeys or other mammalian animal models by several orders of magnitude. They are also very, very rarely used for research in the way you're describing, have very significant differences in their immune systems relative to mammals, and are probably inappropriate for what is my best guess at the experiment you want to do. Gene editing of mice or cell lines is done routinely, so more or less anything you can think of genetically is possible. I would guess that your best bet on this front is probably still epidemiological data.
At this point, doing any efficacy studies on the vaccine is very difficult. It's better than being COVID-19 naive (i.e. never infected), but there are virtually none of those people left in most countries of the world. If your comparison is previously infected vs. vaccinated there (as far as I'm aware) doesn't seem to be a meaningful difference in outcomes. This may change if they update the vaccines to actually target the variants people are being infected with.
I still haven't seen any convincing data for safety concerns with the mRNA vaccines, minus the extremely rare myocarditis/anaphylaxis after vaccination or the development of anti-PEG antibodies.
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