Seems like China did fine with more conventional vaccine technologies. I'm glad we have another tool in the toolbox, but I am missing why the mRNA vaccine tech was necessary for COVID.
The chinese vaccines are mostly inactivated coronavirus vaccines and are only 50-60% effective. We are seeing countries which relied heavily on them such as Chile and the Seychelles having large and sustained outbreaks because they aren't effective enough to stop the spread. They probably do fairly well against mortality though.
I'd say we would be in an incredibly worse position if we only had J&J and Astrazeneca in the west. In the US the pandemic is over now and we have only vaccinated about half of people with the mRNA shots. I strongly doubt we would be normal again now if we had not had those.
> China did fine with more conventional vaccine technologies
China's Covid vaccine is far less effective than the mRNA vaccines, a fact that's been recognized by its own leaders [1]. It's also less extensible--we have covered most of the parameter space conventional methods offer. A new platform allows us to target e.g. HIV anew [2].
I think if we still had AstraZeneca we would not be in an awful position - but that vaccine already had a massive supply constraint - the EU is still pretty pissed about that. So if there were no other vaccines that would be worse for starters.
Also, as others have pointed out, it’s more effective.
Correct me if I’m wrong about this but it seems to be deceptive to think about it in terms of effectiveness.
60% doesn’t seem that much worse than 95%. Feels like 2/3 as good.
But if you look at it the other way around it’s 40% vs 5% which makes the gap much clearer - 8X more people getting symptoms (not sure what the data is on hospitalisation / deaths is though, probably closer)
Plus I believe mRNA vaccines should end up being cheaper in the long run.
Oh and plus you don’t feel as bad after getting them.