Vaccines prevent the spread of covid in strains that are not highly transmissible. Original strains pre delta, probably are reduced significantly by being vaccinated, but evolution doesn't care and presses on.
Thus we have viruses like this and that will only continue if we don't create basic inoculation, which is going to reduce spread in a certain way, but probably not entirely, and would likely reduce mutations significantly versus plague lickers that think their immune system will save them instead of turning on them and crippling or killing them.
Your theory is all well and good, but in practice, Israel had the majority of people vaccinate, and the virus still spread rampantly. In fact, rate of spread after being highly vaccinated is higher than the rate of spread before vaccines were even available.
There are studies which indicate the vaccines may prevent some transmission, but a review of many studies suggesting that shows that it is widely unknown how effective it actually is. Moreover, it appears that reduction in transmission wanes considerably over time with the vaccines, again, with details still under investigation.
The truth here matters. For one, on a personal level, if you went from hiding in your house in March, to cheering on the local hockey team in June after your second Pfizer shot, it’s time to re-assess. Look at the recent UK REACT data: vaccinated people in mid-July were three times less likely than unvaccinated people to test positive for Covid-19. Great. But… they were almost twice as likely to test positive as unvaccinated people did just a month before, in mid-June! If you reduce your odds of infection by a factor of three with vaccination, but increase your risk of exposure by a factor of five, either due to rising prevalence or shifting your behaviors, you’re still more likely to catch a case of Covid-19 than if you had skipped the vaccine and stayed fixed in time. Put simply, regular high-risk exposures to SARS-CoV-2 can overwhelm a very good but imperfect vaccine.
Remarkably, the CDC is still proclaiming that vaccine breakthrough infections are rare - but when normal people hear that their barber, their cousin’s husband, and seemingly half the New York Yankees’ starters have experienced breakthrough infections, they might assume the CDC is lying.
We have made pariahs of the unvaccinated as menaces to the public good. Even if this might not be the most effective form of public health messaging, perhaps this made statistical sense, at least, when we believed the mRNA vaccines to reduce all infections (including asymptomatic) by some 90%. Coupled with limited data from a UK study which showed household contacts of someone with a vaccine breakthrough infection were about half as likely to develop covid-19 as contacts of an unvaccinated person who became infected, it was reasonable to estimate that vaccinated people were almost 20 times less likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 than unvaccinated people. This assumption led to the CDC’s recommendation that vaccinated people could drop their masks.
Unfortunately, the times, they are a-changing. The CDC famously reversed course on masks for the vaccinated. Data has been mixed, but several recent reports suggest the viral loads of those with vaccine breakthrough infections are akin to the unvaccinated. A thorough study from Singapore showed that vaccinated cases dropped their viral load faster -- but viral loads were identical in days 1-5, when, logically, we might think most transmission takes place. Lacking a proper household transmission study post-delta, it’s simply not good science to assume the vaccinated spread less Covid-19 once they get infected.
From a societal perspective, is it reasonable to discriminate between the vaccinated and unvaccinated given this data? My second Pfizer shot was 7 months ago. An unvaccinated person without prior immunity is probably now only twice as likely to be infected as I am, but I can walk into a bar in New York City or Paris for a drink, and a VA hospital or Mayo Clinic for work — and they cannot.
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We saw this in the UK, where deaths among the vaccinated went from “rare” to two-thirds of all delta variant deaths by July. We saw this in Israel, where literally no fully vaccinated people died of covid-19 for entire weeks in June, but by August over 60% of the severely ill were fully vaccinated.
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The inconvenient truth is that neither natural immunity nor vaccines are likely to protect well enough, long enough, to shift this disease from pandemic to endemic and have it look the way most of us would prefer: partying like it’s 2019, and free of worry about hospital capacity. That, unfortunately, is probably a fantasy in the immediate future. So, too, is the idea that if we could only convince a few more stubborn vaccine hold-outs to get one set of shots that this will all be over and New Zealand can open its borders.
Let's Stop Pretending About the Covid-19 Vaccines | RealClearScience
This is a good article, which talks a) about how vaccines are effective and b) how there is a big disconnect from the pro-vaccine claims/messaging and the actual effectiveness.
I've never been "anti-vaxx", despite being labeled as such. I am, however, pro-truth, and the truth is that the vaccines have been greatly oversold and the messaging about them from those promoting them has not been honest.
Yes, we need to reduce the spread of Covid. As such, i still have never been in any public indoor setting for a prolonged (> 15 minutes) period of time, and i always mask and am very conscientious about social distancing). I am unvaccinated, but i know that i haven't spread the virus (i've had multiple negative tests for Covid as well as a negative antibody test). Meanwhile, several others on these forums are condemning the unvaccinated as spreading the disease, but admit that
they have actually had Covid - which means they have been a vector in spread and an opportunity for mutation.
