Overselling the vaccine in 2021 was not being pro-vaccine. It was pro-stop-worrying-about-the pandemic, from the doctors who assured us herd immunity was imminent.
(...)
No vaccine is 100% effective or safe, and being pro-vaccine means acknowledging their
blemishes and areas of uncertainty, at least with new vaccines.
When the original COVID mRNA vaccine data was announced (
here and
here), they were 95% effective against COVID infection and even better against severe disease, though
not 100% effective as several doctors claimed. There was
a lot to be positive about, and it was vital to convey this information to the public. I encouraged vaccination with every patient I saw, and I still do. Countless people are alive today because doctors properly extolled the benefits of the COVID vaccines.
While optimism was entirely appropriate in early 2021, so was caution and humility. The virus was just a just year old, and January 2021 was the deadliest part of the pandemic. Over
3,000 Americans died on some days that month. The virus had given us
many reasons to respect it in that first year, and we didn’t know what variants might be on the horizon.
The vaccines, of course, were brand new. Only 36,930 people had been vaccinated in the two mRNA trials, and they lasted just several months. The median age was 52-years, and trial participants are often unrepresentative of the public at large. There were just 347 cases of COVID, 40 severe cases, and only 1 COVID death in these trials.
It wasn’t possible to conclude from the original vaccine trials that the vaccines would be 100% effective against death. These trials taught us a lot, but they were the
starting point of us learning about these vaccines, not the end. Over the next few months, hundreds of millions of people around the world would be vaccinated. We still had a lot to learn about their real-world effectiveness, especially over the long-term. We had literally everything to learn about their impact on viral transmission.
Because I am pro-vaccine, I hope I never portrayed them as a perfect panacea that would end the pandemic, and I did my best to acknowledge their unknowns. For example, in
April 2021 I said:
"Im very very optimistic vaccines will cut transmission of disease. I’m not certain of it. This is why I wear a mask still in public and when treating covid patients.
Overhyping Vaccines Wasn’t Pro-Vaccine. It Was Pro-Stop-Worrying-About-COVID. (Science-Based Medicine, Oct 1, 2023)