Alright what's the way forward then
There's a lot between "herd immunity via vaccination" (very good) and "uncontrolled spread" (very bad). Protecting a lot of people is not as good as protecting everyone. But it's better than protecting nooone.
It’s gonna be like the flu, but ya know deadlier, where the name of the game is control and stamping out outbreaks aggressively.
The biggest groups that are ineligible are people with vaccine allergies and people with some autoimmune diseases which is vanishingly small.
Or: make vaccinations mandatory if you want to protect those who cannot get a shot for health reasons.
Remember, the reason is vaccination hesitancy or refusal. A perfect example of antisocial and stupid behaviour.
To put this one in perspective, we already make vaccinations mandatory for public school attendance, and colleges go one step further and require vaccinations for attendance, too.
Both of those factors make COVID vaccination quite different from, say, measles vaccination (~97% prevention, lifelong immunity), and seemingly more similar to the flu vaccine, which is not required by any schools (that I know of).
As to the time the immunity lasts, that remains to be seen. Since it is brand-new, we will only know when new cases from previously-vaccinated people pop up. Maybe it'll be yearly, maybe a booster every 10 years, maybe lifelong. There is research showing that the antibodies from a corona infection last about half a year, but that is not the only factor that may provide immunity. And the yearly flu shot is because the flu virus mutates very rapidly, which corona doesn't as much.
Every institution under the sun failed.
We say we need to trust the science, but the scientists were all wrong: LANL put out a preprint paper that estimated r0 at ~7 near the beginning of the pandemic, where it's more like 2.5. The scientists told us that a vaccine wouldn't be ready for years, it was actually ready in months. The media was so addicted to the story that they failed to inform the public of these changing expectations. Meanwhile, the government spent a lot of money, and it's not entirely clear that it did anything except bubble up tech stocks. Did it save many jobs? No, not really, just like all these other institutions failed.
The way forward won't happen, at least for a while, because these institutions are powerful and need to save face.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/03/bi...
I remember the messaging at the beginning of last year being to expect at least 18 months, possibly much longer. For most people, 18 months will be about accurate, for a few people, they will have beat the estimate, but that's not surprising - it's an estimate. It's a hell of a lot more accurate than a couple months.
> these institutions are powerful and need to save face
You just explained above that these institutions are not powerful, and that they have limititations. Which one of these are true?
I remember messaging about timelines of several years. The fact that science eventually arrived at a consistent and accurate message doesn't mean that there wasn't consensus around the wrong opinions when it was most critical.
> You just explained above that these institutions are not powerful, and that they have limititations. Which one of these are true?
Nowhere did I claim they are not powerful, I simply claimed that they made bad decisions.
Here's the list of vaccines under development.[1] There are 105 different vaccines in the pipeline. Most of those are more traditional approaches and don't work yet, need further testing, don't work as well, or have other problems. What we have now is the minimum viable product - two doses, difficult handling and distribution, requires an injection. Some of the ones in the pipeline are skin patches, nasal sprays, or pills. The Merck pill, though, turned out to be a dud - provides only weak protection.
The non-injection schemes may help overcome some of the vaccine resistance problems.
Throwing money at the problem did help. Usually, vaccine R&D consists of finding the most likely candidate, setting up the Phase I/II/III trials, and waiting to see how it works. If it doesn't work, the developers go on to another candidate. Developing 100 different vaccines in parallel improved the odds. A lot.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...
I am surprised if you are taking all "scientists" as a collective group that you are focusing on early attempts to create models rather than the delivery of a vaccine (by scientists) and overall improvement of disease handling by scientists.
What powerful institutions need to save face exactly?
That's an easy way to dismiss the real harm that has been done with lockdowns. If it's cost-free, of course, let's value and protect all life. But these lockdowns have a huge impact on people, too. It's a trolley problem, can we at least be honest about that?
It's so unbelievable far fetched, that asymptomatic people should still transfer virus through contact surfaces and that this will in any significant way increase the infected health care professionals at the elderly peoples homes, despite them having professional equipment, and those elderly people, who are a part of the risk group, while another VERY large part of the risk group can isolate themselves, still would be enough to motivate a lockdown.
It's getting so incredibly unreasonable, everything will be impossible if you put an endless price to every second of a human life.
[1] Notice how all the worrying variants are from countries with inadequate lockdowns?
"huge" numbers of people are not dead, look at excessive mortality, adjusted for population, compare 15 years back. Lo and behold we have had several deadlier years.
In Germany all restrictions were lifted for six months and nothing happened, then suddenly infections went up when the weather got cold and OMG it's because we let people go out. Then we lift the restrictions slightly and now when infections go up again, following the next spell of cold weather, we are certain that it was because we let some people go to the hair dresser.
However, the lowered restrictions during German summer also had a visible effect, look at the numbers between June 2020 and August 2020 and you will see a distinct rise there. It isn't nearly as bad as in September, but it is there.