We've had 20 months of lessons, some already forgotten

There are varying levels of irresponsibility. That’s why we generally agree that it's fine if you want to get drunk on your couch. But it’s not fine if you’re piloting an airplane.

So people who are genuinely concerned about the safety of vaccines should not be mandated to get a shot if they have minimal close contact with others, or primarily work outdoors or by themselves. But a nurse? A sailor on a submarine? It seems strange we should even be debating this, like debating whether a surgeon should be mandated to wash his hands before surgery if cleanliness is a violation of his beliefs.

More people died than needed to in COVID's first year because we were slow to react out of the gate. But it’s almost forgivable, because a lot of nations struggled. Only a relative few — South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand and a few others — got it right.

But really, everyone was flying blind. No one knew how tricky COVID-19 would be, largely because as a killer it is rather inefficient. When SARS broke out in Asia in 2002 the people who had it knew it, no question, two days after being infected; 10% of the people who caught it died. Ten years later, MERS, which originated in Saudi Arabia, was three times as deadly as that.

These aggressive and fast-acting viruses were easy to contact trace and quarantine, and SARS disappeared just as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared, while MERS never gained significant traction.

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The problem with COVID-19 is that it takes up to two weeks to show itself, and some people who get it never show symptoms. That means someone who feels fine can cause a superspreader event out of the blue, and there’s no way to prevent it before the fact, and little that can be done after.

When the uber-contagious delta variant arrived on the scene, contact tracing became all but futile because there physically weren’t enough people and not enough time to do it. So our main defense has to be the vaccine.

It is interesting what we can forget in 20 months. If Donald Trump was slow to acknowledge COVID-19 in public, in private he initiated Operation Warp Speed to fast-track a vaccine, something he wanted accomplished by the end of the year. This made a lot of scientists uncomfortable, including Anthony Fauci, who feared such a rush job would compromise safety.

When this secret plan was outed by the press, the president's PR flaks tried to put the best face on it: “Operation Warp Speed is clearly another extension of President Trump’s bold leadership and unwillingness to accept ‘business as usual’ approaches to addressing the COVID-19 crisis,” said Michael Caputo, the department’s assistant secretary for public affairs.

Probably no one was more surprised than Michael Caputo when it turned out he was right.

Warp Speed was a brilliant success. It was a public-private partnership with $12 billion in government funds feeding oxygen into the brains of pharmaceutical companies. Some of this money would go for naught, and everyone knew that going in — AstraZeneca famously sputtered, and Merck gave up on its vaccine projects in January. But lessons were learned about what worked and what didn’t, and the public might be assured that Warp Speed included safeguards against flawed vaccines.

Astronaut John Glenn famously quipped that his rocketship contained 2 million separate parts — all produced by the lowest bidder. Some vaccine hesitancy is no doubt fueled by the speed at which the vaccine was produced, which would implicate cut corners and aborted protocols.

That’s a fair concern, but there is an answer. No vaccines were developed for SARS and MERS, in part because they quickly died down, reducing the urgency. But scientists have been trying all this time, giving them a nearly 20-year head-start on the COVID-19 vaccine.

By October 2020 the Trump administration was predicting 100 million doses would be available by year’s end. That proved overly optimistic. Like President Biden’s pullout in Afghanistan, the process was messy, but ultimately the finish line was reached, and no one is arguing that we are not better off for it.

If missteps were forgivable in Year 1, when we did not know what to do, they are not forgivable in Year 2 when we do. The answer to COVID-19, along with associated problems such as economic hiccups, supply chain issues, inflation and stock market gyrations is to voluntarily get a shot.

That would also end a lot of cultural strife over masks, mandatory vaccines and social gatherings. A simple shot in the arm is really the only thing standing between our present condition and returning to normal.

But the continued resistance to such an easy solution raises the question of whether returning to normal is what certain people really want.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.