They were wildly effective for a few months after being given. We don’t know how well they would continue to work in the absence of mutation.
But it’s worse than that: the revised vaccines appear to be nowhere near as effective even against strains closely related to those which they target. As a somewhat plausible mechanism, repeated doses have been shown to induce IgG4 production, which non-mRNA vaccines don’t seem to do.
Measles and Chickenpox are both airborne, although they’re not respiratory the way Covid is. But their respective vaccines are vastly more effective.
I’m not saying that I know, or have strong evidence, that mRNA vaccines are weak. But I do think it’s fair to say that we have no evidence that they can be comparably effective to earlier vaccine technologies.
Coronavirus were thought to be non-vaccinable, even worse than the flu. They are behind a lot of winter colds, and they are a great pain in veterinary. Veterinaries are the ones that were pessimistic before mRna vaccines, because they were trying vaccines for decades to no avail.
Measless and chickenpox are very stable, and even the body gains inmunity for life just being exposed to it in the childhood.
All of them are virus the same way an ant and a elephant are animals. You might kill the ant with a magnifying glass, but good luck trying with th elephant.
> Coronavirus were thought to be non-vaccinable, even worse than the flu.
Citation needed. I think the biggest reason there’s no common cold vaccine is that there are too many common cold varieties, often not even related to each other.
Dengue was thought to be a difficult target, and are some non-mRNA vaccines looking pretty good in trials right now.
I refered to veterinary as a source of pesimism. There are a number of veterinary serious problems related to coronavirus. I'm going to just refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus#Infection_in_anima.... Labs are trying to get vaccinations for those infections for years if not decades, to no avail. We are talking of millions, if not billions, in farm loses, so not a minor issue.
When all the SARS-CoV-2 event was raging, people from veterinary were very pesimistic, because they knew coronaviruses change so rapidly that no (traditional) vaccine holds for long enough. Luckily, mRNA vaccines shorten the window between variant detection and roll-out. They are trying genetically altered viruses that include multiple versions of the S protein, to induce the immunity, so it's not like they are working with ancient technology or no resources.
You also recognize that "dengue was thought to be a difficult target", and indeed it was. You don't need [citation] to assert that. The fact that we were trying to vaccinate against Dengue for almost a century is [citation] enough. The same holds true for coronavirus, specially in veterinary.
> repeated doses have been shown to induce IgG4 production
I have a strong suspicion that this finding explains some if not all of the weird results with these vaccines.
* The 95% effective was a measurement solely of sickness, not infection. At the time this was reported, we had no idea if this meant it prevented infection/improved the immune response (good) or suppressed the immune response so we didn't develop symptoms (bad).
* Tons of countries had huge infection spikes just a couple months after reaching high vaccination rates.
* "Long Covid" seems to have become far more prevalent after the vaccines than before.
Here's what I think is happening: The IgG4 finding is key in explaining all of these. It suppresses the immune response, which would allow the virus to run wild without any immediate symptoms (95% initial efficacy). This could cause small amounts of damage that accumulate into Long Covid (why it's associated with infection but seems more prevalent in vaccinated people), as well as turn the vaccinated into asymptomatic spreaders (the high infection spikes).
Personally, I think mRNA vaccines were a complete failure.
Measles and chickenpox are both respiratory and airborne. The serial interval is longer though, gives the vaccines more time to work to prevent transmission. Though, the chickenpox vaccine is more of a "parental time off work harm reduction" thing, however the newer shingles vaccines make that somewhat less so, as the combined vaccines do probably have a RRR on getting symptoms for your whole life.
Edit: not to say there's no "positive" effect on the total death rate (i.e. the vaccine causes there to be less deaths overall), it's just not a cost effective positive effect considered in isolation.
The new vaccines are always outdated by the time they get to market, it just mutates too fast. For example Omicron emerged in November 2022, and booster shots for Omicron weren’t available until far later. And now the disease is much more diverse.
No vaccine technology will be able to solve that on its own. There would need to be a significant change in risk tolerance of approving and manufacturing vaccines and deploying them on a rapid timescale.
> Measles and Chickenpox are both airborne, although they’re not respiratory the way Covid is. But their respective vaccines are vastly more effective.
Natural infection with Measles and Chickenpox are also vastly more effective at preventing reinfection than natural infection with SARS-CoV-2. It is a property of the virus, not the vaccine.
But it’s worse than that: the revised vaccines appear to be nowhere near as effective even against strains closely related to those which they target. As a somewhat plausible mechanism, repeated doses have been shown to induce IgG4 production, which non-mRNA vaccines don’t seem to do.
Measles and Chickenpox are both airborne, although they’re not respiratory the way Covid is. But their respective vaccines are vastly more effective.
I’m not saying that I know, or have strong evidence, that mRNA vaccines are weak. But I do think it’s fair to say that we have no evidence that they can be comparably effective to earlier vaccine technologies.