> Wasn't this known from day 1? COVID-19 vaccines were never going to give us sterilizing immunity.
Absolutely not. It's trivial to go back to earlier this year and find public health officials promising that the vaccines would stop transmission and infection. They may have even been somewhat right until Delta took over (perhaps precisely because it had an evolutionary advantage against mass vaccination?).
I mean the political messaging has been as you said.
But scientifically it was known from the beginning that the vaccines were non-sterilizing [1], so I think any scenario different to the current one of endless boosters was just a fantasy or a "noble lie" to promote vaccination at best.
Absolutely not. It's trivial to go back to earlier this year and find public health officials promising that the vaccines would stop transmission and infection. They may have even been somewhat right until Delta took over (perhaps precisely because it had an evolutionary advantage against mass vaccination?).