[lamontcg]

I mean from the start of the pandemic most virologists were leaning towards COVID becoming another seasonal human coronavirus. Fauci initially was prepping us for the vaccines only being 50% effective against infection (which is probably around about where they actually wound up).

There's this Mandela effect in left-leaning circles which thinks that the messaging started with the early 3-month >90% efficacy-against-infection results from Dec 2020, and they're getting fairly hysterical that we abandoned zero covid, when that actually was never the policy. We just collectively all leaped to that hope with the first round of vaccine results because we wanted the pandemic to just have a simple off switch.

And now that's been twisted up into weird us-vs-them political pathologies where the nominally right-wing antivaxxers are shouting about how the vaccines don't work because they weren't what was "promised" while the left-wing is getting hysterical about giving up on covid eradication.

Most virologists/immunologists/microbiologists are happy that we have vaccines that are 95% efficacious against severe disease/death and that the pandemic is either over or winding down (based on entirely debatable definitions), but this pisses off both different political tribes in different ways.