> This may well be true, but I’ll be far more likely to believe it when there’s an mRNA vaccine that’s anywhere near as effective as the best old boring vaccine

> This may well be true, but I’ll be far more likely to believe it when there’s an mRNA vaccine that’s anywhere near as effective as the best old boring vaccines. You mean like the influenza vaccine that is only about 50% effective and you have to get a shot every year because the virus eventually achieves immune escape? You mean like the old boring human coronavirus vaccines against things like HCoV-229E or HCoV-OC43... that just don't exist? If you're thinking of something like measles where the vaccine confers lifelong protection, that has nothing to do with the vaccine. The virus just can't mutate to escape the immune system response to it without negatively affecting replication and transmission. And you can see that with the immune effects of the virus itself. Get actually infected with measles and recover and you'll be protected for life against getting measles again. Get influenza and you won't have lifelong protection. Get COVID or any other human coronavirus and you won't have lifelong protection. Go get into an argument with your own T-Cells about they're so shit against respiratory viruses, they're the ones at fault. Although with mRNA vaccines we actually might be able to generate vaccines that target more conserved sequences the stalk of influenza's hemagglutinin surface protein and get the immune system to recognize a much broader spectrum of influenza viruses and possibly give lifelong protection. You'll never get that with inactivated or attenuated virus vaccines since you can't target that specifically.