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> That's genuinely insane levels of drug success. The trials did indeed look pretty good, and they met their primary endpoints, but they were necessarily short-term trials, and IMO they were nowhere near as impressive as some of the old impressive vaccines. Try reading up on the history of the varicella vaccine: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S375/6... Apparently you can give the vaccine after exposure, and it’s nearly 100% effective. 50 years after development and ~30 years after widespread rollout began in the US, the same vaccine still works, although the number of doses given has been increased to two because a single dose wasn’t quite good enough for herd immunity. (Chickenpox is far more contagious than at least the original COVID strain was.) I rate the COVID vaccines as an excellent improvement for society, absolutely worth getting in most populations and unquestionably worthy of approval, but merely so-so on the scale of vaccines. (I’m not sure I rate them worthy of continued approval and widespread deployment at current prices. If nothing else, serious follow up should be required to determine how repeated use of the mRNA vaccines compares to, say, Novavax. And health agencies should consider moving to a fee-for-efficacy model instead of a we-pay-whatever model — if pharma companies know, in advance, that they’ll get paid more for doses of a better vaccine, maybe they’ll make one instead of resting on their mediocre laurels.) |