Comment by faeriechangling
2 years ago
No, I think I will stand by my position that the vaccines did in fact slow the spread, especially early on. I think there is LOTS of evidence about the vaccines effects on transmission which points to them being effective.
Also think back to before we had good evidence on transmissibility/infection. Myocarditis hit the young, who were the last to be vaccinated, and consequently among the last to be researched. So the evidence of the vaccinations effects on transmissibility/infection led the evidence about myocarditis. Before either of those bits of evidence came out, the vaccines were nevertheless VERY effective at reducing hospitalisations from COVID-19 caused by early strains in those initial trials. I've also only really heard of the Pfizer trial's being severely criticised after the fact.
So there was good cause to get vaccinated the entire time, although the value of vaccination kept dropping as new strains kept cropping up which were seemingly less impaired by vaccination, and after omicron I saw a huge amount of people start to skip vaccination.
> I think there is LOTS of evidence about the vaccines effects on transmission which points to them being effective.
Can you point to some canonical sources on this? Preferably things that were published in the last year or so.
My understanding is that effects on infection and transmission were overstated and very short lived anyway. Didn't everybody get covid eventually, multiple times even?
Everyone getting covid and slowing transmission aren't incompatible. In the no lockdown, no vaccine world, everyone gets covid in ~100 days. With vaccines that period is a lot longer (roughly a year?) even though omicron has roughly twice as high a transmission rate. The simplest proof that vaccines have an effect on transmission is the number of infected people by vaccine status. There have been dozens of studies of this (see https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccine-effectiven...) but this really is one where you can just eyeball the effects https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/10/28/us/covid-brea....