I think the biggest unsung problems in this saga, is actually one of marketing.
The average person has experience with vaccines that have 3 properties: (1) long lasting, (2) prevent contagion (3) and major symptoms. By calling the mRNA shot a vaccine , the WHO and CDC transferred such properties to the shot. That may have been great for encouraging adoption, but also comes with consequences particularly if two vaccine properties fail to hold, and a 3rd is not flawless.
This was never made clear by anyone of relevance - instead the mantra was "take the shots and all will be well". We oversold the solution.
People took the shots, then behaved as if nothing else mattered. Dropped masks. Started going nuts.
Right. Even knowing the facts it's hard to not buy into the hype to some degree.
In the end, the only things I personally care about regarding the benefits of any vaccine are:
1) not having some horrible/painful/debilitating long term condition from getting sick
2) not dying
3) not spreading it to others
Even if the marketing said it would only prevent severe disease but you'd still catch it just as easily, I'd have still have been among the first to show up for the shot. Promising it as some panacea is going to leave people disappointed.
I can't grasp what mix of societal factors is causing the lack of will to be vaccinated. The two best cases for widespread support of vaccines that I can think of are Smallpox and Polio. Smallpox was a worldwide effort to eradicate a disease that had been a scourge on society for a thousand years. The wealthy countries of the world sent doctors to every corner of the Earth to vaccinate people to ensure its eradication.
"Normal" smallpox killed 1 in 3, the rarer hemorrhagic form killed >90% of those infected. The survivors also faced a lifetime of hardship from damage it inflicted.
Polio had a fatality rate of 2-5% in children and 15-30% in teens and adults. Of all the cases, 1 in 200 had permanent paralysis.
I just don't get it. No one is dying horribly of measles, mumps, rubella, typhus, diphtheria, polio, smallpox, etc. because of vaccines and antibiotics. It's almost like COVID's lethality is at a magic point where most people are extremely concerned about it, but it's low enough where doubt persists because people aren't keeling over in the streets.
Some of its political, and some of its misinformation.
But mainly people think their governments are either being dishonest or incompetent, or some combination of both. I'll let you decide whether you think that's justified.
But my point is this, when you lose trust in the experts to tell you right from wrong, you will instead resort to making sense of the world by your own ability. Therein lies a whole class of problems that lead to conspiracies and alt remedies.
Regarding 2 and 3, it feels like a major factor here is the huge number of people who have forgotten (or never knew) that vaccines as a category aren't automatically 100% effective, because all the hard work to wipe out diseases like measles from the general population has already been done.
The flu shot needs to be updated yearly, and it mostly prevents hospitalizations and deaths. Seems pretty similar.
The flu vaccine is about 70% effective against getting flu[0], but it varies wildly by year. The Pfizer mRNA vaccine is about 50% effective against catching COVID five months later[1] (for the delta variant, anyway), but the third dose seems to push that up substantially.
this has been a worldwide problem - the fact that it even happened in germany is concerning. Governments were looking for easy way outs left and right, but more importantly, did not take the time to create an international scientific task force to research treatments. The Manhattan project started 2 years after the start of WW2. Maybe the time is right to consider large-scale responses to this war as well. Or at least to realize that epidemiology isn't really as good as it should be and we need to fix that fast.
The average person has experience with vaccines that have 3 properties: (1) long lasting, (2) prevent contagion (3) and major symptoms. By calling the mRNA shot a vaccine , the WHO and CDC transferred such properties to the shot. That may have been great for encouraging adoption, but also comes with consequences particularly if two vaccine properties fail to hold, and a 3rd is not flawless.
This was never made clear by anyone of relevance - instead the mantra was "take the shots and all will be well". We oversold the solution.
People took the shots, then behaved as if nothing else mattered. Dropped masks. Started going nuts.
Now we see the results.