COVID-19 has ebbed and flowed. Originally, we were warned it could be a Black Death-style disaster; it turned out to be more like a very serious influenza season, with perhaps two or three times the mortality of a normal flu, mostly concentrated among the elderly—a nontrivial social cost, but still a manageable situation.

At various times, it also appeared that we were out of the woods. The grim experience of New York in early 2020 was not repeated in most of the rest of the country. Rather, the initial wave came and went far less dramatically, with the vast majority of people either not getting infected or not becoming seriously ill.

But COVID has a way of making a mockery of predictions. Because, after a brief reprieve, it resumed: first in the summer of 2020 in the South, and then, later, nationwide.

At the end of 2020, vaccines came online. These novel vaccines appeared to be working, as cases soon declined. Of course, the decline in cases could have also just been a coincidental event based on the natural rise and fall of cases in every pandemic. By early summer 2021, though, things had gone so well—whether because of vaccines, natural immunity, or a combination of both—that Joe Biden more or less declared victory over the coronavirus.

Then, in spite of widespread vaccine uptake, the Delta surge arrived. We were told vaccines prevented death and disease at high rates, but the totals of mortality with Delta exceeded those of earlier waves. Statistical tricks made this appear to be a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” but that was only because estimates included cases from earlier in 2021, when fewer people were vaccinated, and many were catching the earlier (and deadlier) Beta variant.

None of the data really squared with the claims of vaccine efficacy. One would expect at least some significant downturn in cases, and certainly in death and hospitalization, if the vaccine were truly 95 percent effective and something like 75 percent of adults had the vaccine. It turned out the vaccines lost efficacy quickly and barely put a dent in the spread of Delta. The vaccine promoters (and mandaters) overpromised and under delivered, and continue to do so.

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