When SARS struck more than 8,000 people and killed nearly 800 in the spring of 2003, the world clamored to know when a vaccine against the deadly virus would come to the rescue. Vaccine manufacturers and health institutes in Asia, the United States, and Europe rose to the challenge and began to work on vaccine candidates.
Two years later, there are no SARS vaccines on the shelves. None have come to market, nor are they likely to any time soon. Public attention has moved on, and the H5N1 avian flu virus emerging in Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia has eclipsed SARS. The threat of SARS has been overshadowed by the possibility that the bird virus, which rarely jumps from human to human, could reassort with a human strain and become highly transmissible, unleashing a worldwide pandemic to rival the deadly Spanish influenza of 1918.
The 2003 SARS outbreak has not repeated, ...
