The technology they invented is incredibly promising for new vaccines and they should be attracting enough investment (through contracts or other deals) to continue innovating and saving lives. Maybe they can license it as a last ditch effort to build revenue, but unfortunately the public perceptions about vaccine efficacy is on the wane and government contracts are no longer there to support this vital work both in the present and as a hedge against future pandemics.

Instead they took the line of "we know better than you and we're going to force you to do this".

Democrats have a real problem with the "we know what's good for you" attitude.

It actually was plausible for a time that vaccines could create herd immunity and thus mass vaccination was highly desirable. You’re retconning today’s knowledge onto politicians of five years ago. Knowing what we know now about the vaccines, yeah, it was a bad move, but it was reasonable at the time.

That the virus would mutate this much was not something that scientists could have predicted at that point. I don't mean that it was entirely unexpected, but there simply wasn't any way to forecast how much it would mutate in advance.

The updated vaccines against newer strains still did their job at preventing death and serious illness. But they couldn't prevent infection for the new strains.

Some politicians and parts of the media were quite bad at handling the way the pandemic changed over time. But it was still easily possible to get good information about them.

Apologies for being morbid, but that's what we call a self-fixing problem, isn't it? On a Darwinistic level, people either adopt an effective threat assessment approach or they die.

EDIT: Following up on some of the comments, note that I didn't actually say whether vaccine deniers do or do not have an effective threat assessment approach - I don't know. While I personally do believe in the effectiveness of vaccines, I definitely am not qualified to be making risk decisions for other people, and it's important for me to say this, because I don't want other people to make decisions for me. For example, I don't want others to tell me to not do extreme sports, or not to go out to the wilderness, or not to drink alcohol, etc, regardless of whether society feels that this increases my health risks. I strongly believe that a core part of being free is being able to make these decisions for oneself. I agree that we should have some way of preventing harm to others, but it can't be something that comes at the cost of removing people's bodily autonomy (or even just denigrating people for choosing differently).

And if you think that HN believes that AI is the future with no scrutiny, you haven't been paying attention.

You just stated your own view as authority.