> with only one jab the mRNA vaccines are only about 20% effective against the UK, SA and Brazilian variants

Do you have a source for this I could see? I did some light Googling and couldn't find anything that said as much; it also runs contrary to the impact of Britain's choice of widespread vaccination over incremental effectiveness gains (though this is of course just a correlation). A study I did find[1] looking at effectiveness in the UK has first-dose effectiveness at 70%, roughly as expected (I'm using the UK here as a noisy proxy for the UK variant, but I think that's reasonable).

Leaving aside the veracity of this concern, the counterfactual was facing the massive winter surge many countries saw while intentionally choosing to vaccinate half as many people. It's not clear at all that it would be good policy, especially given the ability to change policy[2] as the reality on the ground changes. Seeing how public health has conducted themselves throughout pandemic, I simply don't have the blind faith that they handled this cost-benefit analysis competently.

To pick just one example I came across[3]: as much as I respect Bob Wachter, the Chair of Medicine at UCSF, he was exemplary of this flaw in critical thinking ability that medical culture indoctrinates into HCWs. He came around to FDF on New Year's, after a month of arguing against it. It's amazing to see him discover the concept of quantitative rigor in the face of uncertainty when speed is crucial. This is especially striking when contrasted against his prior argument in the opposite direction, which consists of handwavy platitudes around "unnecessary curveballs".

My sister and her husband are both (Ivy League-educated, very successful) physicians, one a clinician and one a clinician scientist. We've had a decade-long conversation about this tendency, the degree to which it exists, the degree to which it's salutary, how it should affect patient/informed-citizen behavior, etc. Part of my relative confidence in my model of this epistemic culture is that these pitfalls were entirely predictable, and indeed, I pre-registered concerns[4] about the pandemic's characteristics and how modern medical culture was likely to interact with it.

This isn't as damning an indictment of medicine as it may sound (the FDA's Vogonic bureaucracy fetish has way more blood on its hands than any of the flaws in medical culture). And one thing I've picked up from all my conversations with my brother-in-law is that the average consumer of medical information is almost unbelievably stupid (not how he would phrase it) and is far better off following public health (and nutrition) advice as dogma than trying to understand and pick it apart. But if you are basically scientifically-literate, say to the point that you can read and mostly understand the paper I shared in [1], you're likely far worse off uncritically accepting their epistemic flaws than using them as a baseline and doing your own research (and as always, retain a heaping dose of epistemic humility around your error bars and counterfactuals)

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1088

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/world/india-covid-second-...

[3] https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1344667655324585986

[4] This was in conversation with them. Sadly, I have no online proof I can share without self-doxxing