Here’s why we don’t have a cold vaccine. Yet.

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…