Yes but those are near lifetime immunities. Not said (that I'm aware of) with these two covid vaccines is how long they protect for. If it is less than a year it will be very hard to get and keep people taking it.
The cost of getting a booster every year is minuscule compared to the number of lives lost, not to mention the hit to the world economy.
A working vaccine is a huge W. If immunity only lasts 12 months instead of 10 years that just decreases the font size down to 64 point from 72 point. I'll take it.
That may be but they must have some indication of how strong a response those who got the vaccine are generating vs the time they entered the trial. Is there fall off? More or less than expected? How confident are they that immunity will last at least a year?
They don't really have an indication of that. The way these trials work is just that they send everyone out to live their lives and check infection rates in the experimental group against the control group, so there's no effective way to dig in deeper to the biomechanics of it. A standardized measurement of immune response could only be done through what's known as a "challenge trial", where participants are deliberately infected with a predetermined dose; some of these are in the works, but none have yet been approved or performed.
Lifetime immunity doesn't make much economic sense. If you have a vaccine with people and governments from all over the world begging for you to sell it to them, vaccine as a service seems like a more efficient model than a one-time purchase.
Not for the market leader, and maybe not for number two. But if you're at the end of the pack, nobody buys from you and you look at the 10 billion people market you could get with a lifetime vaccine...
Which is why monopolies are bad. You don't have a pack anymore, and the leader(s) don't have incentive to do much disruption.
