Regardless of how you view the vaccine initiative, I've been saying for months that it will eventually become a political liability to have been recommending them to as many people as regulators and experts were recommending them to, especially attempts and successes at mandating them. Regardless of whether the efficacy regarding reducing symptoms in the short term was a worthwhile trade-off for imprinting most of the population with antibody memories for a strain that didn't exist by the time they were mass produced. People are going to turn against it over time for the simple fact that they keep catching it (because of the antibody mismatch).
It's really important that saner politicians and parties start synthesizing their "out" for that push, because otherwise it's not just going to be vaccine skeptics that benefit from it. It's going to be people who denied that anything needed to be done to mitigate any of the very, very many preventable deaths. The hardline "there were no problems with these medical products and anyone who says otherwise is a MAGA removed" approach isn't going to be politically successful, and it's important that the rejection of that line be used to actually have protocols in place for possible future pandemics. Things that actually could have neutralized it completely, been only a fraction as expensive as the worst-of-all-worlds approach the US took in particular. The vaccines have to be pinned to Trump's administration, as a result of failures to act on anything and then giving up and praying capitalism would be the saviour even though all scientific evidence suggested otherwise. Hell, even the Western press completely gave up the game during the Sputnik V rollout, arguing that the expedited vaccine platform was actually a greater public health risk ultimately due to odds of inducing mutations, original antigenic sin (imprinting), leakiness etc - they used all of the very real and highly supported arguments against the Russian vax... For some reason nobody is allowed to say that about Pfizer's or Moderna's shit without getting shouted down though.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/12/a-poor-vaccine-is-worse-than-no-vaccine-the-challenges-faced-by-scientists
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-vaccine-russia-mut/russia-vaccine-roll-out-plan-prompts-virus-mutation-worries-idUSKBN25H1FC
It was always about giving people a false sense of safety so they could keep the economy flowing up to the rich without having to lock down properly. Their gross negligence led to a million+ deaths. This should be treated as one of the greatest crimes of the century, but instead, it's going to be swept under the rug because western capitalism is allowed to kill as many as it wants in pursuit of power and luxury for the elite.
