Seriously, the first vaccines are administered the same day the electoral college meets to make Biden’s win official – how hackneyed and overwrought can you get?

I’m still hung up on the fact that we don’t technically know if the vaccine prevents actual infection and spread. I even went back to look at the two initial articles about the effectiveness, and the Pfizer article never actually said *what* it was effective against, and the Moderna one just said it was “effective at preventing illness” – yeah, I did NOT recognize that bit of carefully chosen words.

And I realize part of the reason we don’t know is that we weren’t spraying people in the face with Covid to see what would happen. (Probably a bit of an ethical no-no given that half the folks would be getting a placebo.) But I also think that folks who are willing to sign up for a vaccine trial are also masking up and social distancing and whatnot, so – how do you take those mitigation acts into account? Or, do you just assume that the mitigation acts don’t matter because half didn’t get the vaccine?

Preventing obvious illness is VERY GOOD. But – how are we going to make sure the vaccine doesn’t accidentally spur asymptomatic spread when our testing and tracing is still absolute shit?

If everyone stays masked up after getting the vaccine, and cases go down, how do we know it’s the vaccine and not behavior that is the mitigating factor? (Well, OK, given that like half the country is not going to behave well, that probably answers that question.)

Gawd, I wish I had an infectious disease doctor or vaccine scientist in my circle of friends – I just still have so many questions. NOT THAT I WON’T GET THE VACCINE. I just have a lot of questions, cause I am not an infectious doctor or vaccine scientist, and I’ve never lived through something like this before, and I wanna know all this stuff.

I guess it really boils down to this: What is the breakpoint that tells us, yes, the vaccine is working and you can eat inside again. And I’m not focused on eating indoors just because I miss it (and I do!) – but you can’t eat with a mask on.

I guess I want to know when Dr. Fauci is getting a reservation at Chef Geoff’s for dinner. And what is the metric that will make him do that.