kerodon

kerodon t1_j4xvm43 wrote

Reply to comment by techblaw in Moderna says RSV vaccine is 84% effective at preventing disease in older adults by esporx

🧐 friend, I think you might be confused about how vaccines work. Nothing I said implies incompetence or any reason to instill distrust in the vaccine creators. Because that's explicitly the issue is that the vaccine was highly effective against the original strains but it was not as effective against the other variants that become more prevalent due to rapid mutation and spreadability.

It works in the same way we have different flu vaccines each yea. While to you if might just be " the flu vaccine" to most people, the scientists who work on creating the vaccines that will get distributed actually complile the most common and likely strains to be spread each year and gear our vaccines toward that to have the highest likelyhood of preventing the most illness and reducing the most severe symptoms for public safety. We also monitor how those strains evolve from year to year to improve them.

It has nothing to do with them not taking that into account initially because I'm sure they were aware of the potential ways it could develop. But without knowing exactly which strains become prevalent or how they will mutate, we can only do so much. And the vaccines still provide some level of protection regardless. It has nothing to do with incompetence, that's just a limitation of knowledge because we can't predict the future?

I am in no way saying you should blindly trust any for profit company, but these are definitely not something that they failed to do correctly or hsve any reason to be doubted just because some people might misinterpret the data due to not understanding what the data was communicating.

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