Understanding Why COVID Vaccines Disappointed

 

Clearly COVID vaccines have been a disappointment.  When we first heard the announcement that there were vaccines that were 90% effective, we could hope the pandemic would finally be over and we could go back to normal.  It was actually fairly predictable that there would be new variants that would be vaccine resistant.  That is a routine occurrence with corona viruses and is the reason to get annual flu shots.  But the vaccine companies said if a new variant came about, they could simply plug in the new protein spike.

Well, it hasn't turned out that way.  It turns out that the protection from COVID vaccines wanes quickly and that new variants spread faster than companies can modify the vaccine and get it out.  What went wrong?

Possibly because normally the full test phase takes five years, but COVID vaccines were approved in less than one.  Moderna developed its vaccine within two days of receiving the virus sequence.  The delay was in testing.  By giving emergency use and cutting short the testing, we allowed a vaccine that we had limited knowledge about over the long run.  

This is not a criticism. On the contrary, given that the choices were approving a vaccine before we fully understood it and allowing the pandemic to continue without a vaccine, early approval was clearly the better choice.  But there were tradeoffs at work, and one such tradeoff was that we authorized the vaccine before working out the sort of bugs that would have been worked out with a longer trial period.

If trials had continued for five years, the vaccine manufacturers would have realized that immunity starts waning fast after 5-6 months and requires a booster.  They would, no doubt, have learned how long booster-driven immunity lasts and how often later boosters are required.  And when the announcement came out that drug manufacturers had a vaccine that was effective, but required six-month boosters, everyone would have known about its limitations in advance and not felt angry or betrayed when the vaccine turned out to have a limited duration.

Of course, we would also have had to face delta, omicron, and who knows what else without the benefit of a vaccine.