It also was to increase the number of people who got covid after being vaccinated, instead of before.
Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.
I think you got downvotes because it sounded like a conspiracy theory, when actually I think you were just trying to say that the idea was to get people vaccinated before they came in contact with the real disease to ease the symptoms, or even give immunity.
> So the vaccines did not prevent infection nor transmission.
Yeah they did. They just didn't do it perfectly. And only about half the people out there got vaccinated. So vaccines failed to be a silver bullet that ended the pandemic.
Can you name a single vaccine that prevents infection and transmission, as in "nobody with the vaccine gets sick or gets someone else sick"? I don't think such a vaccine exists, but I might be wrong.
CDC says Polio is "99 - 100 % effective" against paralytic polio [0]. So essentially perfect efficacy. Covid vaccines look like a failure in comparison (<60% effective against hospitalization, much more significant harms)[1]
To me the problem wasn't that the vaccines didn't perfectly to prevent infection and transmission; the problem is that the messaging from the medical field was that the vaccine _would_ prevent transmission and harmful reactions would be rare. No matter how much one squints, neither of those look remotely true.
> CDC says Polio is "99 - 100 % effective" against paralytic polio [0]. So essentially perfect efficacy. Covid vaccines look like a failure in comparison (<60% effective against hospitalization, much more significant harms)[1]
You're using an arbitrary delineation which the parent didn't. "Essentially perfect" is imperfect, just like the Covid vaccines - because the measure wasn't "more than 99% effective", it's "100% effective".
> To me the problem wasn't that the vaccines didn't perfectly to prevent infection and transmission; the problem is that the messaging from the medical field was that the vaccine _would_ prevent transmission and harmful reactions would be rare. No matter how much one squints, neither of those look remotely true.
When and by who was this messaging put out? The Covid vaccines are pretty darn good at protecting you - but only from the original strains, they're not good at protecting from mutated strains. You need updated shots for that, by which time the virus has mutated further.
I’m not implying that the numbers I choose are the best to use, but I think they are a fair indication of a vaccine that is very effective vs one that is marginally effective. If you have some numbers that are less arbitrary, I’m open to new info to change my mind.
During the pandemic most health institutions were being really optimistic in their messaging about the vaccines. I guess it’s just semantics, but I don’t think you can say a vaccine is darn good then say the virus mutates too fast for the vaccine to be effective long-term. Aren’t those things in opposition?
> I’m not implying that the numbers I choose are the best to use, but I think they are a fair indication of a vaccine that is very effective vs one that is marginally effective. If you have some numbers that are less arbitrary, I’m open to new info to change my mind.
I don't think that any specific number is a good delineation between "ineffective" and "effective". I fundamentally disagree that the Covid vaccines are ineffective. The only way to call them ineffective is to use a delineation which no vaccine survives.
> During the pandemic most health institutions were being really optimistic in their messaging about the vaccines. I guess it’s just semantics, but I don’t think you can say a vaccine is darn good then say the virus mutates too fast for the vaccine to be effective long-term. Aren’t those things in opposition?
No, they are not in opposition. You left out the important part: the vaccines are darn good against the original virus. They are still sorta good for mutations.
Without a delineation, how do you argue that it is effective? How how do you argue that any treatment is effective if not statistics like these? And it’s not fair to say no vaccine survives this delineation because I specifically used Polio as an example of an effective vaccine.
There isn't a magical number which means the vaccine is effective, and below that number it is ineffective. A vaccine is effective if it helps people deal with a virus (i.e. lowering chance of hospitalisation/death). It doesn't magically become ineffective because it doesn't meet an arbitrary percentage of prevented cases.
The Polio vaccine is "only" 99-100% effective. That means that it's not 100% effective (as in, there are cases where it doesn't prevent transmission/infection). According to the criterium laid out by GP this means it is an ineffective vaccine, just like the Covid vaccine.
But they don't prevent infection nor transmission. What is the word to describe a proposed medical treatment that does not work?
Both the Covid vaccine and the vaccines you are saying had great results share this trait. You mentioned this negatively for the Covid vaccines. Why is it different for other ones?
I don't know anyone, in western countries, who got polio vaccines and suffered illness. I know people who took the covid shots and boosters and got sick with covid and variants. Some got it multiple times, so somehow the covid shots are interferring with sterilizing immunity.
> Some got it multiple times, so somehow the covid shots are interferring with sterilizing immunity.
How do you get to this conclusion? People without vaccination seem to be more likely to be re-infected. If anything, Covid itself is interfering with sterilizing immunity, and the vaccines help!
That is simply not how the vaccine was presented by authorities and the media. They literally said the vaccine will stop you from getting it and stop transmission. It took them months to acknowledge you could still get it and spread it with the vaccine and all the data simply points to a reduction in severity of symptoms.
What happened was they rolled out the vaccine before they had all the data, and it was bit oversold despite lack of data, perhaps to encourage people to get it.
It's water under the bridge now. But don't gaslight people on what they were told.
They were lying. Or at the very least didn't understand the claims actually made by Pfizer/etc, which was only that these vaccines prevented the disease, not that they prevented infection/transmission. They made no claims about infection/transmission.
It comes down to the stupid conflation of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 into just "covid". Pfizer/etc use the two terms correctly, saying they prevented COVID-19, but didn't say anything about stopping SARS-CoV-2, but because everyone thinks "covid" is the virus they can't seem to understand what was actually said.
No, it's true. The matter of fact was that some collective hypnosis or lie was happening, and when you told people that the vaccine wasn't meant to stop transmission, they would just get angry from the cognitive dissonance.
No, we, who are rational truth-seekers, are the ones who were gaslit for 2+ years about the whole idea of "natural immunity". Despite having had covid and recovered from it, we were still told we needed to vaccinate even AFTER recovering from it.
Edit - to elaborate, I just mean that it made sense to try to keep infections down and give companies time to develop a vaccine. Not sure why this struck a nerve.