There are multiple clear reasons to do this actually. We have COVID inquiries in my country the UK. Part of that is looking at excessive spending on unnecessary or inappropriate equipment and corruption with regards to spending. Looking at vaccine manufacturers is important as it’s the governments job to regulate these things. They are the ones who paid for the vaccines and determined who got what type of vaccine and in what order. If there was a possibility to vaccinate people faster and more efficiently more people could have survived and our economy might not be quite so bad. It’s also possible that serious side effects caused by the vaccines could have been reduced. We can and should hold both the NHS and the pharmaceutical companies accountable for what they have and haven’t done.

Furthermore we should continue pursuing improved vaccines in the name of eradicating the disease. There was talk of a new vaccine called nova vax. I am now wondering what happened to it.

As for “absolving” people who didn’t get the vaccine. I am not sure what to say here. I don’t think you should guilt people over decisions they made about their own body. That’s a morally questionable thing to do. I say this as someone who got three shots of vaccine for COVID.

Pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of epidemiology. To prevent an outbreak you need only get the r value below 1. The r value being the average number of people and infected person passes the disease onto. That’s why we were able to successfully eliminate smallpox and suppress measles and other common diseases in developed countries. Even in countries where most people got vaccinated for COVID like my home in the UK this did not happen. There are still outbreaks of the disease in places with high rates of vaccination. This tells me we are in need of either a better vaccine or a new strategy like anti virals. There was actually talk of improved vaccines like nova vax at one point.

I am not from the USA and was not talking specifically about the USA but go off I guess.

COVID does not undergo as rapid antigenic shift as influenza viruses. It’s more closely related to cold viruses (hence coronavirus which are cold viruses) which generally mutate more slowly. So I don’t think this is the whole reason even if it’s part of the explanation. There are other parts of the viruses behaviour and characteristics that maybe could explain this. It doesn’t really make a difference for my point though. The vaccines were substantially less effective than promised. We also didn’t have to use experimental vaccine techniques and could have saved money by using cheaper vaccines.

They aren’t anti-vax in general though. They didn’t have a problem with the vaccines used in the 90s and neither do I.

COVID vaccines were and are different, at least the ones used in the west. China and Cuba used traditional vaccine types such as inactivated vaccines which contain whole dead viruses. These are cheap and easy to mass manufacture and have been used for decades.

USA vaccines used mRNA which was a newer and more experimental technique that hadn’t seen deployment at this scale ever before. The UK vaccine ChAdOx1 used a different technique involving using another virus as a vector (specifically an adenovirus). Again this is a new and somewhat experimental technique. Now the UK vaccine is at least reasonably easy to manufacture and distribute. The mRNA vaccines on the other hand were extremely difficult to distribute as they required very low temperatures to be stored, basically cryogenic temperatures. This required new techniques to be developed to distribute and administer them at the scale required, and was very difficult for the global south to do. They were also more expensive.

So you could argue that at least some of the vaccines (mRNA type) were a cash grab or not suited for global use and were just a way to get more money for big pharma. If this is actually true I have no idea.

In terms of effectiveness this is where it gets interesting. None of these vaccines were as effective as originally thought. They often did not stop people getting infected as was originally claimed (supposedly more than 90% effectiveness for mRNA vaccines). This is why COVID is still in circulation today. The vaccines did reduce symptoms and hospitalisation, which is certainly better than nothing, but it’s also not what was promised. So yeah I can understand why people are pissed. It also seems that using the more expensive and supposedly more effective vaccine types was basically pointless as traditional vaccine types or the cheaper UK vaccine would have worked just fine.