The vast majority of people on this site know what adaptive immune response means.
The COVID injections are not stopping the pandemic in almost any way shape or form. Preliminary data suggest the shots reduce (but do not eliminate) the risk of dying. That is all.
When people take routine vaccinations when young or old, those people do not get the disease and they do not transmit the disease.
When people take the COVID shots, they still catch the disease, they still spread the disease, they still get sick, they still get hospitalized, and they can still die.
That is an awful "vaccine".
The data best looked at is how many vaccinated people vs unvaccinated people are ending up in ICU/dead
A vaccine doesn't put up some force field that prevents the virus from entering your body. When you get a 'covid test', they swab your nose. This is still surface level on your body. If covid is rampaging through a community and you have been around people who have had it, it's not unsurprising you would find it in peoples noses
'Covid test' is actually incorrect. Those tests do not test for covid. They test for the presence of the sars cov-2 virus. 'Covid' is the disease you get from the virus. You dont swab a door handle that's been sneezed on and say it tests positive for covid
If I got a vaccine for whooping cough and someone with whooping cough happened to sneeze and cough all over me - take a swab in my nose and you would probably find it. The difference is, I will probably not get sick. The thing is - no one tests over and over for other communicable diseases in vaccinated individuals.
When vaccines are talked about achieving 'herd immunity' it is usually in the order of a population having 95% of the entire population covered.I was surprised when countries starting trying to use a metric of 70-80% of people aged 16+ as 'herd immunity'. This still leaves many millions of people in a typical sized country unvaccinated. Imagine if measles only had 70% of people aged 16+ vaccinated..... I guarantee you measles would be an omnipresent threat.
The primary job of a vaccine is to prevent getting the disease. The covid vaccines are successful in this - and I'm not talking about a postive test which only tests for the viral presence. I'm talking about actual covid and all of its pitfalls. But the coverage of people vaccinated and being a corona style virus means that transmission is not going to be stopped. Too many millions of non vaccinated adults and almost every child are acting as great incubators for the virus.
If you are vaccinated and have the virus in your nose, your chance of serious illness and death is vastly reduced. Real world data backs this up. If vaccine immunity wanes over a few months, that is not the result of an awful vaccine. That's the 'fault' of your immune system. Because whether you get the virus for real or a vaccine, the immune memory is the same.
Pandemics over time fizzle out. This one will be no different. We can see with this omicron strain that the virus has adapted to be super contagious but less lethal. It was always expected. Viruses wouldn't spread far if it kills or bedriddens its hosts. If a new variant pops up and it ended up being super lethal - it wouldn't overtake omicron. It couldn't. Everyone who participates in society is going to come into contact with sars eventually and I know I'd rather be vaccinated when that's me. Hopefully for the unvaccinated the variant floating around at their time is mild.
One other thing to consider I feel a lot of people dont.
Looking at pictures of the lungs from covid survivors - even in cases where they thought they only had a mild infection.... Some of them look like they worked in a mine inhaling silica dust. The level of internal scarring in the body - that's bound to give an increased risk of cancer later on. The scarring goes beyond the lungs too such as the cardiovascular system and the brain. Going forward will we see increased rates of lung cancer, heart attacks or strokes? I have no doubt that the blame will be squared on vaccines though. No one will ever suspect that maybe a nasty disease that ravaged peoples bodies could possibly have anything to do with it
America will make a great case study. You've had a sizeable chunk of your population afflicted with the disease. Australia managed to avoid a lot of the misery. However with the delta strain and now omicron it looks like the cat is out of the bag and we are getting lots of cases. But in places like my city where 99% of eligible people have been vaccinated and larger states like NSW having around 93% covered it should provide a good comparison
Edited by shifter, 25 December 2021 - 05:57 PM.