[dawnerd]

Traditional vaccines have also been "unreasonably effective". I'm all for mRNA going forward (I got pfizer myself) but lets not downplay just how effective the "old" tech has been against covid. It's really quite amazing how well we've been able to target it. Now if only we could get more people to accept that the vaccines are safe...

[zajio1am]

> Traditional vaccines have also been "unreasonably effective"

AFAIK not really. I know just about Sinovac and that was significantly worse efficacy than other vaccines. Note that adonovirusvector based vaccines like AstraZeneca one are not 'traditional vaccines' but also rather new tech.

[dawnerd]

That’s why I put old in quotes. mRNA is also nothing new, just new at this scale. People are just acting like it’s something that was just invented over the last year.

[armada651]

In your comment you implied mRNA is new tech though, you may want to clarify what you meant to say.

[armada651]

Which old tech vaccines? I haven't seen any attenuated vaccines for covid. Even the viral vector vaccines aren't exactly "old tech" and they are certainly less effective than mRNA vaccines.

Just like with mRNA; viral vector vaccines haven't been seen widespread use before COVID either. And the only attempts at an attenuated vaccine have been pretty ineffective as far as I know.

[dawnerd]

They're all pretty comparable. Novavax should be getting a lot more attention since it doesn't require super cold storage and appears to be on par with the mRNA vaccines.

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-compariso...

[armada651]

Novavax does look promising, but I was mainly pointing out that there is currently no effective "old tech" vaccine in widespread use, it's all new tech.

I'm not saying that out of skepticism for these vaccines, I think it's amazing we're deploying all these new platforms. I just think saying that they're no more effective than vaccines we've had before is a misrepresentation of the facts.