* No vaccine “works.”
1. There is no vaccine that stops the infection in 100 percent of cases … 50 percent would be really good.
2. Vaccines only target specific variants, so they have to be constantly updated and will always be behind and imperfect.
3. Vaccines are less effective on certain population groups, including the elderly and the obese, two particularly vulnerable groups for Covid.
4. Hopefully a lot of people will get one or more Covid vaccine shots, but even with conpulsory vaccines like childhood vaccines, many don’t get them. With Covid you’re going to see a leveling off where people hope to coast in the glide stream of others. And it may be that you need so many boosters that people will tire of the vaccines.
5. Something that gets lost in the understandable attempt to deplatform crazy antivaxxers is that no vaccine is completely safe and every vaccine is a risk-benefit tradeoff. Which you already know if you’ve ever read the fine print on the thing you signed prior to any vaccine you have received.
In the end vaccines will help reduce the chances of getting the disease, and treatment regimes and drugs will make recovery safer. (The whole “chronic Covid” thing is still an unknown … maybe you never really recover.) So the odds that you balance when you decide you want to get out in the world a little more will be more in favor of going out if there are vaccines.
I think way too much emphasis is being put on vaccines and drug treatments, over the cold, hard truth that the world is permanently changed and certain things are not coming back, like eating out, concerts, and live sports. People and businesses that adapt as soon as possible to the new, permanent reality will be better off.
* Russia took Corona very seriously very early. They ramped up production of Corona tests early in the year, while US fumbled. You can say that Russia won the test race, and, as a result, took a large chunk of the world market. Indeed, according to this Newsweek article, over a third (!) of the Covid tests administered in the US through July were imported from Russia.
* Putin is a risk taker (with other people’s lives). If it works, he gets to claim that Russia was the first on the market with a vaccine.
Being #1 is very important for Russians with a Soviet mentality like Putin. The Soviet Union was obsessed with being 1st or claiming to be first. Remember that Putin orchestrated a massive doping and drug test cheating scheme so that Russia could win the most Olympic medals at Sochi. The Soviets dropped their moon program like a hot kartoshka the minute they lost the space race – if they couldn’t be first, what was the point of spending billions to visit a worthless rock? Russians are deeply insecure that they are inferior to the West and are always looking for confirmation that they are not inferior, they are actually better.
