In 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were put to the test. Here’s what we learned

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2021 was the year the COVID-19 vaccines had to prove their mettle. We started the year full of hope: With vaccines in hand in record-breaking time and their rollout ramping up, we’d get shots in arms, curb this pandemic and get life back to normal. That was too optimistic.

Roughly 200 million people in the United States — and billions globally — have now been fully vaccinated. Three vaccines — one from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, and the other two from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are available in the United States. Pfizer’s is even available for children as young as 5. About two dozen other vaccines have also been deployed in other parts of the world. In some higher-income countries, the United States included, people have already queued up for booster shots.

But 2021 has also been the year of learning the limits of the vaccines’ superpowers. With the vaccines pitted against aggressive coronavirus variants, inequitable distribution, some people’s hesitancy and the natural course of waning effectiveness, there’s still a lot of work to do to bring this pandemic to an end. As if to hammer home that point, the detection of the omicron variant in late November brought new uncertainty to the pandemic’s trajectory. Here are some of the top lessons we’ve learned in the first year of the COVID-19 vaccine. — Macon Morehouse

In January, in the midst of a bleak winter surge that saw average daily cases in the United States peaking at nearly 250,000, the vaccination rollout here began in earnest. Soon after, case numbers began a steep decline.

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