Covid vaccines are not meeting expectations

 Washington Examiner:

The COVID-19 vaccines are a remarkable medical innovation that may very well have saved tens of thousands of lives this past year. But let’s be clear: They are not doing what we were told they would do.

When the vaccines were first made available in early 2021, the public was led to believe that inoculation would prevent infection and transmission. President Joe Biden argued last summer that “you’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.” Dr. Anthony Fauci similarly declared on a Zoom call with TikTokers that if they got vaccinated, they wouldn’t have to worry about catching COVID-19. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow claimed in March that COVID-19 “cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to get more people” and that the “virus does not infect them.”

Now we know this is untrue.

Fully vaccinated adults are testing positive for COVID-19 at about the same rate as unvaccinated people, regardless of how many booster shots they’ve gotten. And while the vaccines may prevent transmission marginally, insofar as they might help reduce the number of days a person is contagious, there is little evidence that they are doing anything at all to prevent the spread of the omicron variant, which is far more contagious but thankfully much less severe than the original COVID-19 strain.

That’s OK — the purpose of the vaccines was never to wipe out COVID-19 completely. Viruses mutate. In a world of 7 billion people, it is impossible to stop that from happening.

The goal of vaccination was to protect people from severe illness as much as possible — to limit hospitalization and death. The vaccines have done that. A report from the Department of Health and Human Services in October found that COVID-19 vaccinations reduced hospitalizations among vulnerable citizens by more than 100,000 and deaths by 39,000. That’s a lot of lives saved.

...

There is more.


Overselling the vaccine has led to some deciding that it is not worth it.  I suspect it has increased resistance to the disease but has not eliminated it as hoped.  If the less-lethal omicron variant creates antibodies as the other variants did it may accomplish what the vaccine has failed to do.

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