Originally Posted by
BoilerUP
The Ebola vaccine has proven very effective.
???
For values of effective I guess.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...al-drc-region/
More than 80% of people who were vaccinated didn’t end up with the disease, said Muyembe, and those who did had relatively mild cases.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01950-0
But it was an epidemic that involved immunizing only 300,000 people, and even so it took two years. And another epidemic of Ebola has already broken out on the other side of the country. And - despite the problems they had with vaccine acceptance, people are a lot more willing to be vaccinated against something with a 50% mortality than they are against something with a 0.5% (or less for the young) mortality.
I’m not against immunizations and certainly hope that we come up with an effective, safe, and cheap vaccine. But I don’t think it will be the panacea everyone seems to assume it will be. Public acceptance and the sheer logistics of any mass immunization process are serious issues that will need to be overcome, even with a perfect vaccine.