Too much money at stake and Pfizer & Moderna are not going to give up on a cash cow.
I think it's possible that superior vaccines may be in the pipeline but we'll never see it. Also, keep in mind viruses are going to virus so they shouldn't had overpromised us when we got our shots, they should had been clearer in their messaging that this is more like the annual flu shot.
They were all wrong to bet the farm on vaccines and to put the kibosh on re-purposing other drugs. They didn’t even investigate them! It would have been cheap and easy to do a controlled trial in 2020 with 100,000+ cases a day to test various treatment protocols. Others call the current process the “let them die protocol” and there is some truth to that.
I can’t say with certainty these regimens would work though there is a lot of data that shows they could help a lot, especially when given early. But that’s not really the point. All these hundreds of billions of dollars we spent, and nothing spent on just some simple random controlled tests of generic drug regimens. The system is captured by special interests and politics. That is not following the science.
Now they say the antibody treatments like Regeneron’s may not even work on omicron. I don’t know and did very little research on that.
The question of how the vaccines would do vs. variants was always there. I certainly recall no promises being made beyond “should have some benefit” against variants that had not even yet arisen. And for sure little expectation was reasonable for 3rd or 4th generation variants. After all, we had the example of flu vaccines and flu variants to look at, and I’ve always figured results would be in that ballpark.
Not that I think the messaging was good - it was incompetent to say the least. BUT, even here on FR an argument against the COVID vaccines is that they are not like, say, the polio vaccine, with very long term protection. On the other side, many pro-vacc individuals seemed to have a similar expectation of years of protection, but I recall NO major gov’t spokesperson (etc.), the manufacturers, etc., saying that. Nor would they. 1) We were already seeing variants pop up. 2) The only possible “predictor” (based on variant rate) would be flu, and that would be “ballpark” at best.
I personally think a lot of the over-expectation amongst the populace was just wishful thinking for COVID and all the associated crap to just go away.
Now, granted, maybe part of my “take” is the about 1/10,000th of what my Dad learned in his many years of research in the wars against plant diseases, me picking up a tiny fraction of the basics, but, I still find it almost silly that anyone would assume (or demand) a vaccine based off an existing pathogen strain / variant with the qualities of COVID could perform better over many months than, say, typical flu vaccines.