> And is it still controversial to say that the efficacy of covid vaccine was a lot more disappointing than we were basically all expecting?

As "controversial" means "prolonged public dispute or debate", necessarily so.

But I think also incorrect compared to the scientific discussion at the time. Not necessarily false compared to the political discussion or the newspapers etc., but the actual researchers themselves, who understood the reports and didn't get all their information from misleading summarised headlines like the rest of us:

"""What that means is if you had a hundred people who got coronavirus, this vaccine would have prevented 95% of them. So if that same 100 people had been vaccinated, only five of them would have got coronavirus. And that's the number that I really look for to start off with.

Now, when all of these studies were being designed, they said that they wanted to be able to get a vaccine that had a vaccine effectiveness of greater than 30%. That was the number that they were targeting. If they had a vaccine effectiveness of greater than 30%, then this would be a good result.

And to have a vaccine effectiveness of 95%, that's huge. That's so much more than we ever could have hoped for. And it's such a big result. And the other studies have also had really good vaccine effectiveness estimates.""" - https://www.numberphile.com/podcast/jennifer-rogers

> Or that the apocalyptic predictions of lockdown-lifting were just a tiny bit overstated

You reckon?

Emergency breaking is unpleasant, but it means you don't hit something that will decelerate you even harder.

This is the UK inquiry after the events, obviously the US is going to have had a different situation: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz9py388z17o