But the way it is written sounds like nobody on Planet Earth could have possibly predicted this and that the way B-cells and T-cells work is completely novel discoveries in 2022.
There were people saying this is roughly would happen in mid-2020.
Tony Fauci was saying he'd be happy if the VE against disease was only 50% in Fall 2020. He was trying to set expectations to about where we are right now.
It gives the wrong impression to people who don't know anything about it and it undermines the vaccine messaging strategy. There's a stronger message that virologists and epidemiologists who were specialists in this kind of thing were grounded mostly in reality all along and THIS WAS THE PLAN AND THE PLAN IS WORKING. By claiming that we're radically learning new things it sounds like the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Getting a vaccine with around 50% efficacy against disease and 90% efficacy against hospitalization was always the winning strategy. We were just supposed to hit 80%-90% vaccination rates at least and the low vaccination rates are meaning that the Omicron wave was more of a burden on hospitals than it ever needed to be.
What went wrong is that the vaccine trials were cut short. People who complain about that usually try to argue we cut short the "long term safety" outcome, which is nonsense because vaccine side effects are autoimmune conditions that either start turning up in a population 3 months after dosing or they don't. What we actually cut short was the _durability_ outcomes of the trials since that was the thing that would have taken 2 years and we didn't have the time. Turns out the headline 90% VE against infection numbers weren't durable but the damage was done once they made the initial headline splash and everyone entirely forgot that Fauci was setting expectations down around 50% beforehand. Then they felt they were lied to. Now they feel like the vaccine program was a failure.
We're now back on track to the original plan, and its viewed as being a failure because the phase III results jacked the expectations up to the mRNA vaccines being magicsauce that would instantly end the whole pandemic. This article is still selling it like this is sort of Plan B in response to information that we could never have anticipated. Instead we're back on what was Plan A all along after the hypecycle got blown away by waning immunity and Delta and Omicron.
I think the lesson here is that one shouldn't listen either to antivax grifters or to greedy pharma execs who oversell their products because of the enormous incentive to do so, whether it be vaccines or Alzheimers treatments. The best approach is to listen to what real scientists who actually understand the subject say, but that does take patience and a willingness to invest time.
> By claiming that we're radically learning new things it sounds like the whole thing was a clusterfuck
Dr. Fauci and all the other anointed "experts" were constantly saying "there is so much to still learn about this virus". They still do when asked questions they don't want to really answer.
They've been acting like COVID was some mysterious brand new virus that required us to abandon every single thing we knew about epidemiology. They are somewhat responsible for this insanity.
There were people saying this is roughly would happen in mid-2020.
Tony Fauci was saying he'd be happy if the VE against disease was only 50% in Fall 2020. He was trying to set expectations to about where we are right now.
It gives the wrong impression to people who don't know anything about it and it undermines the vaccine messaging strategy. There's a stronger message that virologists and epidemiologists who were specialists in this kind of thing were grounded mostly in reality all along and THIS WAS THE PLAN AND THE PLAN IS WORKING. By claiming that we're radically learning new things it sounds like the whole thing was a clusterfuck. Getting a vaccine with around 50% efficacy against disease and 90% efficacy against hospitalization was always the winning strategy. We were just supposed to hit 80%-90% vaccination rates at least and the low vaccination rates are meaning that the Omicron wave was more of a burden on hospitals than it ever needed to be.
What went wrong is that the vaccine trials were cut short. People who complain about that usually try to argue we cut short the "long term safety" outcome, which is nonsense because vaccine side effects are autoimmune conditions that either start turning up in a population 3 months after dosing or they don't. What we actually cut short was the _durability_ outcomes of the trials since that was the thing that would have taken 2 years and we didn't have the time. Turns out the headline 90% VE against infection numbers weren't durable but the damage was done once they made the initial headline splash and everyone entirely forgot that Fauci was setting expectations down around 50% beforehand. Then they felt they were lied to. Now they feel like the vaccine program was a failure.
We're now back on track to the original plan, and its viewed as being a failure because the phase III results jacked the expectations up to the mRNA vaccines being magicsauce that would instantly end the whole pandemic. This article is still selling it like this is sort of Plan B in response to information that we could never have anticipated. Instead we're back on what was Plan A all along after the hypecycle got blown away by waning immunity and Delta and Omicron.