That approach wouldn’t work for the common cold, because all those hundreds of variants are circulating all the time, says McLean.
That’s not to say that people haven’t tried to make a cold vaccine. There was a flurry of interest in the 1960s and ’70s, when scientists made valiant efforts to develop vaccines for the common cold. Sadly, they all failed. And we haven’t made much progress since then.
In 2022, a team of researchers reviewed all the research that had been published up to that year. They only identified one clinical trial—and it was conducted back in 1965.
Interest has certainly died down since then, too. Some question whether a cold vaccine is even worth the effort. After all, most colds don’t require much in the way of treatment and don’t last more than a week or two. There are many, many more dangerous viruses out there we could be focusing on.
And while cold viruses do mutate and evolve, no one really expects them to cause the next pandemic, says McLean. They’ve evolved to cause mild disease in humans—something they’ve been doing successfully for a long, long time. Flu viruses—which can cause serious illness, disability, or even death—pose a much bigger risk, so they probably deserve more attention.
But colds are still irritating, disruptive, and potentially harmful. Rhinoviruses are considered to be the leading cause of human infectious disease. They can cause pneumonia in children and older adults. And once you add up doctor visits, medication, and missed work, the economic cost of colds is pretty hefty: a 2003 study put it at $40 billion per year for the US alone.
So it’s reassuring that we needn’t abandon all hope: Some scientists are making progress! McLean and his colleagues are working on ways to prepare the immune systems of people with asthma and lung diseases to potentially protect them from cold viruses. And a team at Emory University has developed a vaccine that appears to protect monkeys from around a third of rhinoviruses.
There’s still a long way to go. Don’t expect a cold vaccine to materialize in the next five years, at least. “We’re not quite there yet,” says Michael Boeckh, an infectious-disease researcher at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Seattle, Washington. “But will it at some point happen? Possibly.”