Pfizer-BioNTech Booster Shot Restores Full Covid Protection in Large Trial

We were told that? By whom? Complain to them. Tell them you want your money back.

> if we all did our part

Well there you go.

> and that if we all did our part

We didn’t “all do our part”, though. Only 57% of the US population has been vaccinated.

Insofar that any deal was made, we haven’t fulfilled our half of the bargain.

The vaccines were never sold as something that would stop the virus in its tracks with only half the population vaccinated. They also weren’t sold as having unlimited durability. People needed to not only “do their part” but do it in a timely fashion. One unfortunate weakness of the vaccine is that it has to actually be injected to be effective.

Anyone who "promised" "only two shots and done" was wrong and doesn't understand vaccines. Most vaccines need boosters over time depending on a huge number of variables including the virus' own mutation rate. Everyone should know we get annual Flu boosters, even if they don't remember that you are often recommended to get things like TDAP boosters every 10 years or so (because often it is your doctor's job to remember that for you), and that there are other booster cycles that's just the most recent one in my own memory.

There was also plenty of notice anticipating that COVID may need boosters closer to the Flu range than the TDAP or longer range, especially at first because of how fast it has mutated even before we developed vaccines (we were already on the fourth Greek letter named variant, Delta!).

That's in line with the fact that this virus family ("coronavirus") is one of the viruses that makes up the virus group we have long colloquially referred to as "the common cold" and that this "uncommon cold" of COVID still directly shares a lot of fast mutating properties that made "annual Cold shots" to go with our annual Flu shots not very economically sound. The jump to being a much more deadlier pathogen than previous "common Colds" greatly changes that equation to make vaccines economic for it, but has raised the question from the start of this pandemic if now is the time we start anticipating "annual Cold shots", perhaps in perpetuity, just as we try to get everyone to get their annual Flu shots to avoid Flu's "uncommon deadly reaction" pneumonia. (A lot of the references to the 1918-1919 Flu parallels included that's when we first started seeing a greater economic need for annual Flu shots, beyond just coinciding with when we were developing the first Flu shots, as before that pandemic the Flu itself was often seen in the same light today we see the "common cold", a mostly harmless irritant rather than a very deadly disease.)

(The interesting flipside to some of this is that the pandemic has shown us that we actually have a chance at killing the Flu if we kept COVID restrictions such as social distancing and masking in our societies. The massive "demands" for "normal" that don't include such standards clearly don't want that and we aren't likely to actually cure the flu, but this weird glimpse in 2021 of how close we have come to it is startling. We could almost trade annual Flu shots for annual "Cold" shots right now, if we all did the right thing for a few more years, but most likely we're going to need both. Silver lining, Moderna says their early testing on combined Covid/Flu boosters is going well, so maybe we'll still keep it down to just one annual shot, we can hope.)

> We were told only two shots were needed and that if we all did our part that this problem would go away and we'd go back to "normal".

Who told you that? The question of whether boosters or new vaccines would be required has been around since before the first vaccines were even approved, though it did gain new urgency with the emergence of Delta.

On the "all do our part" bit, very few countries have gotten to even the 70% total population figure that was the optimistic case for halting the less infectious pre-Delta variants. Clearly, we have not all "done our part".

Last I heard 6 months? That's basically where we're at with the annual flu shots.

Phizer bringing planned obsolescence to the Healthcare industry

It’s only excellent if you don’t have competition. And they do. Anyone offering a significantly longer-lasting protection would effectively put them out of COVID business.

The compromises made seem like rational ones given the desperate need we had for vaccines. Easy to look back now that many of us have shots in our arms and critique the procurement process.

These companies were tasked with developing and mass producing vaccines on an unprecedented scale and schedule. To say “it’s imperative you do this but also entirely shoulder the risk in case of error” doesn’t make much sense to me, even if the payoff is in the billions for them.

The US did not bank roll the R&D and manufacturing.

The contracts were options to buy. No cash upfront.

The companies, namely Moderna, got some public funding 10 years earlier. Pfizer did not. The rest was bankrolled by the companies themselves.

If the vaccines had failed they would have absorbed those loses entirely.

And I’ve seen the Pfizer contracts. Of course they were entirely indemnified - would you sell a government an “emergency approved” product and not protect yourself from getting sued into bankruptcy if something went wrong?