My hypothesis is that immunizations can be dramatically improved. Bacteria use a variety of secreted toxins, quorum sensing factors, biofilm scaffolds, and so forth. It would be very good if we could immunize against the few thousand most common virulence factors. Those pathways also provide ripe targets for conventional drugs.
"But antibody production is not instantaneous and can have a lag time of 7 to 10 days, which should be sufficient time for the phages to do their work."
Once, which don't get me wrong is very nice for the patient. But cutting the rate of fatal childhood infections 50% from the natural rate is not good enough. We want 99.99%.
"Also, since phages do not enter human cells, you won't get the typical response from APC's or Helper T-Cells, ..."
They do when their bacterial hosts are endocytosed.
Immunizations are, ultimately, subject to the same problems of evolved avoidance as antibiotics.
The current approach to treating diseases reminds me of the story of how the Yugoslav army shot down an F-117. They had spotters telling them when the F-117 got close, they operated radar that could almost, sorta see them, and they relied on a proximity fuse, a generous damage radius, and a helluva lot of luck. We may currently be able to determine roughly what an infection is, and how it's likely to behave, but we're far, far from being able to determine any of this with sufficient accuracy.
What's really needed is a combination approach, but even a combination approach is useless until we understand more about how bacteria evolve...
Immunity against bacterial virulence factors tends to be persistent. The nature of the proteins is that they cannot change much without losing function. (Unlike viral surface coats.)
"But antibody production is not instantaneous and can have a lag time of 7 to 10 days, which should be sufficient time for the phages to do their work."
Once, which don't get me wrong is very nice for the patient. But cutting the rate of fatal childhood infections 50% from the natural rate is not good enough. We want 99.99%.
"Also, since phages do not enter human cells, you won't get the typical response from APC's or Helper T-Cells, ..."
They do when their bacterial hosts are endocytosed.