“~60-70% effectiveness” is a mediocre vaccine. That is an efficacy we accept in influenza because there are multiple strains floating and constantly undergoing around and figuring out which ones will dominate is an imprecise science, and the limited duration in which to produce seasonal vaccines means that there isn’t time to select for optimal immunogenicity.
It is not “perfectly likely that a later booster will give just as good long term immunity as 3 weeks”; the point of a booster is to provoke a second, more robust memory B cell response that will provide long term sterilizing immunity (that will stop infection and spread) instead of protective immunity that will fade in a few months, allowing reinfection and the potential for sustaining contagion in the population. We know from other vaccines that require boosters that delaying the booster shot significantly results in dramatically lowered long term immunogenicity; essentially, if the ‘virus’ (in the case of a vaccine, the antigen surrogate epitope) doesn’t hang around very long, the immune system ‘assumes’ that it wasn’t a real threat and doesn’t develop long term response in order to prevent allergic response to what could just be a harmless protein.
This isn’t an issue of “letting perfect be the enemy of good”; it is following data-driven medical science and using a verified protocol versus guessing at what might work, when the consequences of a bad guess may be that the entire population lacks resistance and can harbor contagion indefinitely. If this were just a fairly innocuous respiratory disease you might take that risk, but given the bizarre and worrisome pathology of this virus–much of which is still unknown but the fact that it can enter the central nervous system should be highly concerning–the focus should be on ensuring the most effective immune response possible.
There is the assumption that the only way to control this virus is via vaccination and nothing else, which is precisely “letting perfect be the enemy of good”. In fact, there are effective methods of preventing transmission of the virus in the form of physical distancing, effective contact tracing and testing, wearing clinical-grade masks properly, avoiding large gatherings, et cetera, and as a society we need to figure this out because this will not be the last or most virulent pathogen to break out into a global pandemic. Using these methods, countries like Australia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and New Zealand have brought spread of contagion down to manageable levels even without a vaccine and without the excessive and damaging broad business and educational shutdowns.
Stranger