Right...and I guess it has ever been thus...and neither right nor left is immune (tho I have my biased opinions on which is more prone to bias narratives
) To wit: what is so wrong about admitting honestly that what we're facing is unprecedented and while what we've done so far is not unremarkable (Operation Warp Speed, DJT) it just isn't the same product as the MMR, flu or polio vaccines? There is just no equivalency and to suggest as much is at best, not accurate and at worst, dishonest.
The situation is unprecedented and has precedent. COVID isn't the first global pandemic. This won't be the last. If you know the history of pandemics most of what we faced, we as humans have faced before. It just isn't as much of the living memory nor in most professional knowledge spaces. But it is resident in the written history and specialty knowledge spaces. It was niche stuff, and in a lot of ways it still is. So much of what happened recently, including the mistakes made, all happened before, ALL OF IT, the fear and panic, the multiple waves, reinfections, debates about transmission, denialism, ****ty and misleading communication from authorities, civil liberties versus public health, just in time policies that were just too late, preliminary studies that didn't pan out, pseudoscience, sham cures, solid science that was shunned, and emotional reactions from all quarters... it happens almost every time.
What is unprecedented is the science and technology of today.
Warp Speed was an unprecedented mind boggling success thanks specifically to mRNA technology and entrepreneurship, a medical Manhattan Project or Apollo Program, but faster. From patient zero to deployment of vaccine in under 12 months, while a pandemic is only part way through, is an unprecedented triumph of medical science. The speed was only possible because of the shortened development cycle of vaccines based on supplying ephemeral snippets of genetic code to get human ribosomes to temporarily generate the antigen, that code sources by rapid sequencing, them distributing the pathogen's code to labs worldwide (once some scientists went around the delaying CCP government to share it).
In a world wide competition of over 100 simultaneous vaccine development efforts, only two were the fastest and worked. The Chinese and other attenuated virus vaccines didn't work well even to begin with and all the protein subunit vaccines were slow to refine and produce.
Nobody said that's the same as MMR.
BUT This isn't politics, it is psychology.
Remember the goal of Warp Speed: VE 50% reduction in hospitalizations.
What we started with at the end of 2020 was so far beyond anyone's wildest dreams, VEi in the 90s, VE for reduction of death and hospitalizations of nearly 100%... it felt like a miracle. Well, the promise of panacea faded before the reality of viral evolution. And yet, despite all that, with a booster, the Warp Speed requirements are still vastly exceeded by these vaccines.
The issues you brought up that there is breakthrough and decreasing efficacy, particularly against infection, in the face of a rapidly changing pathogen is not shocking for all the reasons I described above. We have seen those before. We see them all the time. It happens in many pandemics, even when there is no vaccine. 1918 H1N1 variants caused the pandemic to come in multiple waves around the world due to antigenic drift and the pandemic lasted years (and then 1918 H1N1 variants persisted as the dominant H1N1 strain until 2009). That's not new. Vaccine breakthrough isn't new. Immune escape isn't new. But for most people, it is a new concept to them.
www.fda.gov
