Markk wrote: ↑Sun May 01, 2022 8:45 pm
Res Ipsa wrote: ↑Sun May 01, 2022 7:52 pm
You can, but you’d be ignoring the scientific facts that actually enabled many others to produce vaccines in a similar timeframe.
And they too, did a great job…correct?
Again, too simplistic. Lots of time and money was spent trying to develop vaccines for other coronavirus without success. Does that mean those folks did a terrible job? Part of the reason the period for development of the COVID vaccines was so short was that researchers built on the knowledge and experience provided by those earlier unsuccessful efforts. So maybe the early failed efforts was a great job and not a terrible job.
The degree to which a virus of affected by vaccination varies widely from virus to virus. The length of time it took to develop an effective vaccine against Ebola has nothing to do with “doing a great job.” Likewise, the fact that efforts to develop a vaccination against HIV has yet to succeed says nothing about whether researchers have done a great job or a terrible job. So, there is a fair amount of luck involved in the characteristics of the virus itself.
And we took a huge leap of faith in using a technique that has never been used to make a vaccine before. That was a huge gamble (that I agree was worth talking), so there was a fair amount of luck in the fact that it worked at all. Lots of things that should work in theory don’t work in practice for all sorts of reasons.
I don’t know what the quality of work that any individual did actual is. I’d like to think that the folks at Moderna and Pfizer and all the other institutions busted their assess and did there very best to deliver safe and effective vaccines as quickly as they could. The speed at which they developed the vaccines that they did was, in my opinion, a great result that for which I am grateful. At the same time, I recognize (as I suspect the scientists themselves would) that their success was due to some combination of very hard work, really smart people, other people smart enough to listen to the really smart people, decades of earlier research by others, and a fair amount of luck. It’s what problem solving looks like when the scientific method works as intended.
Now, if you would translate all of that into “great job,” then I agree. Even so, we don’t know the end of the story with these vaccines and this virus. I’ve had four doses of a new vaccine using a brand new technique against a newly emergent virus that we know very little about. If people had done a “greater job”, would I have received one dose that provides me with sterilizing immunity? I dunno.
I have absolutely zero knowledge about what was actually possible in terms of a COVID Vaccine as of the time the virus was discovered, so I’ve got no benchmark against which to measure “great job.” I’m very happy and grateful that I haven’t been killed or harmed by COVID or a vaccine, so I’m happy and grateful to whoever helped make it happen. And, if it makes you feel any better, as Warp Speed required the president’s approval, I’m grateful to him for approving it. I think that approving that program was the right decision, and I’m glad he made it. Just as I’m grateful to everyone involved in the entire field of vaccine research and development for enabling today’s scientists who were in a position to do what they did.