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Anyone who's been getting flu vaccines surely has a pretty good idea how ineffective they can be.

• tylerhou 6y ago
  Flu vaccines are effective — but the government has to try to predict which specific strains of flu will be active that season. If they mispredict, you might get the flu despite having the vaccine since you got a different strain. For COVID-19, there is a known set of strains that hopefully won't change. So a vaccine targeted towards that set should work, at least temporarily. The following is just me speculating: from what I have heard, coronaviruses are called such because of distinctive proteins on the outside of the cell that are hard for the virus to change. If a vaccine elicited an immune response to target such a protein, then it should be effective for all the strains.
  • ballenf 6y ago
    My point was not that Covid vaccines will be ineffective, just that people have relatively little faith in flu vaccines right now (although I still get one every year, because better than nothing). And I think people will see a covid vaccine as more like a flu vaccine than an MMR vaccine.
• meowface 6y ago
  It's invisible to you until you actually realize it's (partly or fully) ineffective by getting sick. With a mask, you have some general idea well before you'd actually get sick. You can see if someone's wearing a mask properly, but you can't analyze their immune cells and the specific pathogen strains they might be exposed to.