This approach is not new. Albert Sabin developed an attenuated poliovirus vaccine in the mid-20th century that helped eradicate naturally occurring polio in the Western Hemisphere. Attenuated viral vaccines for rubella, measles, yellow fever and other diseases are widely used.

Can a similar vaccine be developed for COVID-19?

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have published a foundational study for that possibility in the Journal of Virology. They asked a simple question: Which mutations predominate when the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 is grown in successive generations—called passages by virologists—in tissue culture?

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