In fairness, I think it's been just as frustrating to the health officials setting out those targets— between non-compliance with the initial guidelines (both due to idiocy, and due to governments dragging their heels on the income/rent supports that would have allowed poor people to actually stay home), and then the appearance of the delta variant just as vaccination campaigns were getting seriously under way, I'm sure it has very much felt like fighting a battle against moving goalposts.

I think we tend to under-acknowledge that the "return to normal" line is also a moving goalpost. I'm typing this comment out from a cross-country trip; when I return, I can eat in a restaurant or work from the office or even dance in a crowded nightclub if I want to. There's still mask mandates here and there, but I think there's a strong argument for the perspective that vaccines already did work and we already are back to normal in almost every way that government policy can achieve.

It's not quite as lax for families with kids under 12, but broadly speaking, I agree with you.

Some things are just never going to be completely as they were in February 2020— for example, I think there's far broader cultural awareness of factors like indoor air sharing, aerosols, hand sanitation, personal vaccine records, etc than probably at any other point in history. I expect that the lower-than-usual flu numbers from last winter will persist for some time as people continue to take care about these kind of things.

And no one alive today will need to be reminded to get the malaria shot before going on safari— checking your vaccine status is permanently embedded in the current generation as travel-thing now, just like making sure you have your visa lined up and your insurance in order.

> due to governments dragging their heels on the income/rent supports that would have allowed poor people to actually stay home

Government supports or not, you do realize everyone can't stay home?

Why do so many discussions around this have to devolve to reasoning against absolute straw-men arguments?

The point wasn't for "everybody" to stay at home but to expand "everybody who can" to the highest possible number, by removing economic and other barriers.

Why do people act like a completely unreasonable plan (and plan is generous) created by the morons in charge was ever going to be followed, let alone work?

Garbage in, garbage out.

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, what do you suppose the decisions makers could have done in the moment that would have persuaded you and other contrarians that they had a plan worth following, or at least worth trying?

> could have done in the moment

Which moment? The moment we invaded Afghanistan 20 years ago and racked up trillions in debt killing people over seas instead of investing in infrastructure? The moment when the Bush administration lied about WMD and the media just cheered the war on?

The moment nursing home residents were left untreated in their rooms because the 'data' said you couldn't treat anybody with steroids?

It's hard to pick a moment, because the 'science' has been junk from the jump. The bulk of 1st world governments are liars and criminals. Why would I believe a solitary thing they ever have to say?

For me, it was when the Swedish approach was widely derided even though it was logically sound. (isolate the at-risk, everyone else get on with life and build herd immunity).

Interesting. I never thought it was logically sound, and my impression is that the the data has borne that out, basically all along (and that it was quite valuable to have Sweden and New Zealand as the two outlier examples for what it looked like to handle the pandemic especially poorly and especially well). A recent example with some hard numbers:

"Sweden has recorded more COVID-19 cases per capita than most countries so far: Since the start of the pandemic, roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy. Sweden has also recorded around 145 COVID-19 deaths for every 100,000 people — around three times more than Denmark, eight times more than Finland, and nearly 10 times more than Norway.

Had Sweden implemented tighter rules, experts told Insider, the country might have seen a COVID-19 death toll more similar to those Nordic neighbors."

https://www.businessinsider.com/sweden-covid-no-lockdown-str...

>roughly 11 out of every 100 people in Sweden have been diagnosed with COVID-19, compared with 9.4 out of every 100 in the UK and 7.4 per 100 in Italy

If the goal is to shoot for herd immunity, then you would need 40-60% of population to have antibodies. No way to get from A -> B without people 'catching it'

At some point it needs to be accepted that Covid is now endemic and is 'never going away'. Trying to stave it off with leaky vaccines is like trying safeguard your 0-day with a leaky firewall.

Logical and medically minded people should focus on developing and testing therapeutics to reduce the need for hospitalizations. Sadly that will require loss of profits to very large companies.

Why jump to an assumption that there's a dark profit motive here? Isn't that what has led to people clinging to snake oil miracle cures like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin?

Certainly there was never any profit motive for anyone (except maybe Amazon and Uber Eats) when people were encouraging to stay home, or wear improvised masks.

In any case, there is lots of study going on in this area— it's not like Pfizer and friends have somehow squelched research into it, particularly when the makers of the other drugs under investigation stand to make a giant windfall from a successful result:

https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/...

Yes it's endemic and we're all just going to get it now. But getting it is much, much less bad for the vaccinated than the unvaccinated, and at least as a parent of young kids, I know I won't be rushing them out to a pox party until there's an approved vaccine they can take first in order to prepare.

>Why jump to an assumption that there's a dark profit motive here?

Total legal immunity + gov mandates to buy your product. Thats probably the largest single profit motive that could possibly exist...I mean can you reasonably imagine a greater profit scenario?

That wasn't the topic but thanks for sharing your feelings.

At this point we need to acknowledge that there will be no "overcoming" it and it will be endemic, like the flu.

Oh, we have acknowledged it. The question is, have our politicians acknowledged it, or will they keep taking our rights?

The acknowledgement of it being endemic doesn't necessitate that we put up with covid's destructive nature. It's still the case that:

1. A large number of people globally don't have access to the vaccine yet.

2. A large proportion of the USA's population either doesn't feel motivated to get the vaccine or is explicitly opposed to it.

There will come a day where we collectively say that enough is enough and we've done all we can, but there is still a lot of work to do before we get to that point. Managing the spread and improving vaccination numbers will overall reduce the damage done to people and the health system when we reach that point.

Stop downvoting this, it's a legitimate question. When are we going to stop all the policy bullshit, accept that it is endemic, and get back to normalcy as much as we can? It's wearing on everybody.

Try going out in public naked or running a few red lights and then come back and troll some more about your "rights". The world is full of rules to prevent you from being a jerk and endangering others.

Going out in the public naked is actually accepted in some parts of the world and it is a lot 'closer' than you think.

For instance, go to one of the beaches right in Barcelona, topless. Another example, go to Baker Beach in SF, topless and bottomless. A third example, go to beaches in some of the Greek islands, topless and bottomless.

Another example, in the summer, do you see men go around topless?

Yet another example, go to bathhouses in Turkey or Japan.

Yet another example, go to your local gym's locker room.

Yet another example, all those tribal peoples that you read about. Many of them were topless and were often bottomless.

Yet another example. Go to the Folsom Street Parade or Bay to Breakers in SF.

How is this endangering anyone other than your prudishness that you want to impose on others?

rules preventing you from doing something is one thing, but injecting a new product some people still have doubts about (no matter if they're correct or not) is a very different matter.

I'm amazed that people still come with the "safety belt" argument.

We've had decades of increase protections about food additives, GMOs, hormones in animals, etc on the principle of precaution with everything related to health, because things in this matter are complex. And now for some reason, we should stop thinking about tradeoffs and unknown unknowns over long terms consequences eventhough we're talking about treating the whole world population.

You gotta be joking, right? You realize the same people who are mouthing off about freedom believe in absolutely zero protections for consumers against food additives and are in a constant state of denial about environmental pollution that has drastically harmed human health and ecosystems right? They very same politicians hemming about freedoms and how vaccines are dangerous just give carte blanche to the marketplace to push whatever preservatives and addiction-inducing flavor molecules into foods are the most successful at jacking up the GDP. All the protections that you mentioned have been over the objections of the exact politicians that you no doubt support because they believe in "freedoms". Or whatever.

You gotta get the MMR vaccine to go to a public school. You gotta get Tetanus and other vaccines to go to college.

Your comment is pretty interesting, because i've had the intimate suspicion that the debate around public health measure to fight covid have been rendered impossible because of the trump / biden US election. The Dem vs Rep political fight seems to be ruining every single scientific debate it gets a hold on.

FYI: i'm french, so i have absolutely no interest in that Dem vs Rep debate, and people here i know that are the most reluctant about vaccination with mRNA vaccines are the ones that are the closest to being ecologist activists.

EDIT: as for other compulsory vaccines, that's why i mentioned "new product" / technology. We're not even talking about a new vaccine, we're talking about a completely new technology to produce an immunity response.

Forgive me for pattern-matching your political leanings; it's insufferable to deal with a dozen variants of "it's just a flu" mutated from the dear leader's mouth over here. You're right, real dialog on scientific matters is getting impossible, because people can't do basic research.

If you'd like to read up on mRNA vaccines, here's an article from the pre-COVID days, before something as simple as a scientific advancement to fight disease became so politically charged.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243

Ecological activists, by numbers, are a round off error in the debate over this vaccine. It is absolutely tainted with politics, as the majority of anti-vaxxers land on one side of the political spectrum. I know some. It's everything from "it's the mark of the beast" to "I'm not so sure about this". What really underlies it is a deep, irrational selfishness that doesn't want to do a damn thing, even if, and especially if COVID doesn't seem that risky for that person. That whole line of reasoning is a fail. People who want the pandemic to be over know that vaccination is the only way. Sitting on your ass, no matter what is in your head, and being another vessel for this shit to mutate is actively prolonging it.

So yeah, I absolutely pounce on ignorant people who are prolonging this.

I would be very careful to label an opinion as being ignorant, and then assert things like "people… know vaccination is the only way [to get rid of the pandemic]".

The scientific community seems to be very divided on whether "getting rid of covid" is even a goal at this point (at least based on what i read on what virologist and epidemiologist say).

I feel you (like many others) have failed to put their instinctive repulsion for the archetypal anti-vaxer aside and objectively evaluate the pros and cons of every strategy.

EDIT: thanks for the paper, but already the title itself says it all and seem to comfort my position: "a new era in vaccinology". We all know what happens with 1.0 versions of a brand new tech, right ? I'll still take the time to read it entirely since you've taken the time to send it to me.

Totally not true about tetanus and other vaccines to go to college.

EDIT: Meningitis is the exception.

This is where I went to undergrad:

https://www.purdue.edu/push/Immunization/

Go look at ALL the other colleges. That is only one.

https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/features/vaccines-for-college...

EDIT: Example, University of Texas,

https://www.healthyhorns.utexas.edu/requiredvaccine/

Meningitis and measles

Your argument comes down to "we limit your rights in other ways, so limiting your rights in this way should be accepted".

That's not a very convincing argument - it could be applied to anything. "We force you to show ID to fly on a plane, so being forced to show ID to access the internet should be accepted".

There is no such thing as safety, only varying degrees of risk. Everyone has a different risk tolerance. Failure to explicitly quantify acceptable risks leads to people making invalid assumptions and talking past each other.

This is very true - I remember a colleague getting slapped down by the FDA when he said his company's FDA-approved drug was "safe". "There is no 'safe' drug", he was told, "only acceptable risk-benefit tradeoffs".

In addition, what is acceptable on a national level (e.g. 50 deaths from vaccination side effects) may not be acceptable on a individual basis (e.g. you die from a vaccine side effect).

Just like people dismiss the risk of Covid until it kills a family member, the flip side is people dismiss the risk of vaccination until it kills a family member.

It seems like longer, but COVID has only been a thing for around 21 months.

To be this far in vaccination at this point is huge progress. Achieving desktop Linux and nuclear fusion have been ongoing projects for far longer.

If you think that's fun, imagine the steady state being like flu - monitoring Covid variants, then trying to predict which ones will be the next "wave".

Some years you'll get it right and put a big damper on spread and some years you'll pick the wrong variant leaving most people unprotected.

That's one reason why flu deaths in the US fluctuate annually (in addition to the severity of the flu). A few years back the vaccine basically did nothing.