Remember the COVID vaccine? Whatever happened to that?

It is amazing how comprehensively the COVID-19 vaccine has departed the global discourse. It’s just gone—poof! Almost overnight. It was all anyone was talking about for months and months and months on end and now pretty much nobody talks about it, ever. I can remember just after the vaccine was rolled out, I ran into an old friend in Lowe’s. I had not seen her for years and went to hug her. She backed up, holding her hands protectively in front of her. “Are you vaccinated?” she asked. That sort of thing was considered normal back then in early 2021. Can you imagine anyone doing that now? Even the super die-hard COVID people would be too embarrassed.

It wasn’t very long ago that people were obsessively talking about the need to increase vaccine uptake and drive up the number of “fully vaccinated” people in the population. “Fully vaccinated” was a briefly used term of art that meant “injected by as many doses of the COVID vaccine as public health authorities say is necessary.” It started out that “fully vaccinated” meant you get, say, two shots of the Pfizer vaccine; then you needed to get a booster shot, then another; I think eventually they said you just needed to get a shot every single year, forever. Then eventually they even stopped talking about that. Nobody talks about it anymore.

You might argue that the discourse has shifted simply because the vaccines themselves were so successful. Deaths attributed to COVID have been essentially a flat line since April of 2022. “Cases” of COVID have been similarly down since October of last year. So maybe the vaccines did their jobs comprehensively enough that nobody feels the need to discuss them anymore.

I think this is wrong for two reasons. First of all, it ignores how completely everyone was obsessed with the vaccines even just a short number of months ago. Everyone was convinced that the shots were both permanent and indispensable, that they were an absolutely necessary and ongoing part of public health. The term “the unvaccinated” became almost a slur; “the unvaccinated” were held up as some of the absolute worst people in society, a selfish and hateful demographic driving a relentless onslaught of sickness, disease, hospitalization, death and chaos. Seemingly everything in the entire world was secondary to getting these people to submit to the COVID vaccine. It defies credulity that a public health hysteria this all-consuming would just disappear over the course of so short a time simply because cases and deaths flatlined.

More broadly we should not forget the parameters of the larger vaccine debate itself. Vaccines are one of the most contentious and unrelenting parts of the present culture wars. Parents who don’t vaccinate their children according to the CDC schedule are reviled as cruel child abusers who don’t care if their children suffer and die from communicable diseases. “Anti-vax” is itself both a pointed insult and a sort of catchall term used to allude to anyone who is even modestly outside mainstream political thought about anything. Few things are viewed with more suspicion and contempt than a family in which the children (and the adults) aren’t vaccinated according precisely to the dictates of public health authorities. People don’t let this sort of thing go! They’re obsessed with it. So the idea that the COVID vaccine would just suddenly vanish from this political milieu is, again, very odd.

My own guess is that the effective uselessness of the COVID vaccines sort of shamed its advocates into embarrassed silence. When it rolled out, the vaccine was hailed as the greatest public health accomplishment in decades and the effective savior of humanity. Within 18 months it had become a corny joke; it didn’t stop transmission of the virus and it came with a host of frightening side effects that appeared to be making young healthy people very ill. I think most people just quietly realized that these things weren’t what they were initially sold as: Instead of a highly effective, targeted, successful pharmaceutical, the vaccine ended up being a pretty shoddy third-rate piece of biomedical technology, rushed to market by greedy corporations, forced on the public by a desperate political establishment, and championed by a media/culture that was more interested in winning a stupid political battle than it was in promoting public health.

After the furor died down and the faults of the vaccine were laid bear I think people just couldn’t muster the necessary energy to defend this stuff anymore. We’ve all moved on. Nobody asks you if you’re vaccinated anymore. Nobody cares anymore. Yet another remnant of the COVID era that has mercifully faded away.