To put some numbers to trying to develop a single therapy (where candidates etc. will fail as you try them)

- Plan to sink $180-500M+ just in R&D

- Factor in failures, regulatory, clinical, recruitment, phase 1/2 trials and you arrive very quickly around $1.3-2.1 BILLION USD per therapy approved.

...there is a 90% chance that you will spend that $1B+ - and it will fail completely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00043-x

https://greenfieldchemical.com/2023/08/10/the-staggering-cos...

It's tough to get people to want a vaccine which knocks you off your feet for 3 days and needs to be repeated every 6-12 months. I'm very bullish on mRNA vaccine technology - but it's potentially a poor fit for rapidly changing viruses.

Quite a lot of the low-hanging fruit from pharma has already been picked. The modern business model for pharma involves coming up with a patentable new drug that does the same thing as an older drug that's now out of patent and available for manufacture as a generic.

Making pharmaceuticals subservient to the whimsy of the stock market is a bad idea. It introduces incentive distortions where none should be.

Unfortunately, one of the key purposes of the vaccine - arguably more important than personal immunity - is reducing the chance of it propagating to other people, and reducing the intensity of the viral load if it does.

If you attend a graduate level CS course on network science, you'll come across network model of herd immunity and mathematical proof of why it is effective. People who developed the model didn't take first amendment into consideration. Otherwise the outcome might have been different.

Hence my statement about hope…

Not really, those people go to a hospital where there is a duty of care. Hospitals don't get to just say "Nah, not gonna help you" and close the door for people showing up in the ED.

So those vaccine deniers get sick, lose their commitment, go to the ED, get some level of treatment/help/etc, and suck up resources and impact help for the guy who got vaccinated then got hit by someone running a red light....

I made a comment that got downvoted and flagged and then dang sent me a nasty gram.

"Chinese bat flu. Deadly enough to be a problem. Not deadly enough to be a solution"

Which is to say it's a real problem. The flu is a real problem, ask any nurse that works in a hospital. With vaccines Covid is 3X worse. But that's not enough carnage to break through most peoples normalcy bias. No ones getting enlightened, instead they'll get angry and lash out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalcy_bias

If by hand waved you mean gone through the same clinical trials and rigor as any approved approach.

They knew the vaccines had substantial side effects before they were released to the public. Those results were put under a 75 year gag order, at least in the US. I'm not sure "hand waving" is the right way to describe what happened, but they certainly could have been more honest with us.

A public health authority's only coin is the extent to which the public finds it credible, and the US public health establishment may never recover from covid.

That the vaccines worked, that natural immunity against COVID didn't exist, that the vaccines were BETTER than natural immunity, etc.

I'm fully vaccinated along with a booster. I was the first person outside of medical professionals that I know that got the COVID vaccine. I got COVID 3 weeks after my booster which is when I was supposed to be the most protected. That's when I came to the conclusion that we were lied to.

My kid got COVID and then he was still forced to get the vaccine because the school district/state forced it. That's because they refused to believe that natural immunity existed or that somehow the vaccine was magically better than natural immunity. This also made me realize how religious this has become because now even the scientists were anti-science.

It took years for them to relent and those several years of religious and anti-science beliefs from scientists and politicians destroyed the trust that people had in them.

J&J vaccine was eventually recalled and halted. By then, at least at the time I lived in Los Angeles, many employers and establishments flat out would not accept J&J vaccination proofs under the premise that because there were multiple boosters available for mRNA, it was no longer effective.

> That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point.

The common scientific consensus has always been "Don't vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic" because it would cause more variants. This was one of the things they absolutely violated.

> The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness.

No this is not true at all. Most deaths occurred after vaccinations rolled out.

The vaccine was developed under Warp Speed, a Trump program (one of the very few things I liked from Trump). It was first made available while Trump was still president. I have some empathy for people who think it was oversold but that wasn't solely a Democrat problem.

The next level up from the Democrats objectively horrible attitude is fascism, which we are currently attempting. I believe Americans have a strong cultural preference to be extreme bullies whenever they can get away with it. So often we are just execrable people who care nothing about others, at all.

That is an interesting point. The statement "the company that helped save the world" that I was responding to was stated without evidence. So, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

IMHO, if someone disagrees with me, they can ask for evidence, and there is plenty. Downvoting makes my post less and less visible, suppressing my opinion, rather than debating it. That's why I think it is cowardly. Of course there is a place for suppression, for example for abusive posts or inciting violence. But here, I politely state my opinion, let people debate.