They often did not stop people getting infected as was originally claimed (supposedly more than 90% effectiveness for mRNA vaccines). This is why COVID is still in circulation today.
Like every vaccine, it prevented sickness in some people and attenuated it in others.
The reason why COVID is still around is the same reason why the flu is still around. It mutates a lot.
COVID does not undergo as rapid antigenic shift as influenza viruses. It’s more closely related to cold viruses (hence coronavirus which are cold viruses) which generally mutate more slowly.
So I don’t think this is the whole reason even if it’s part of the explanation. There are other parts of the viruses behaviour and characteristics that maybe could explain this.
It doesn’t really make a difference for my point though. The vaccines were substantially less effective than promised. We also didn’t have to use experimental vaccine techniques and could have saved money by using cheaper vaccines.
Whether or not this was the case, it doesn’t absolve people who refused to get vaccinated.
Did they over-promise and under-perform? Perhaps, but you’d have to go look up who promised what and compare that with the actual effectiveness of the vaccine, and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
There are multiple clear reasons to do this actually. We have COVID inquiries in my country the UK. Part of that is looking at excessive spending on unnecessary or inappropriate equipment and corruption with regards to spending. Looking at vaccine manufacturers is important as it’s the governments job to regulate these things. They are the ones who paid for the vaccines and determined who got what type of vaccine and in what order. If there was a possibility to vaccinate people faster and more efficiently more people could have survived and our economy might not be quite so bad. It’s also possible that serious side effects caused by the vaccines could have been reduced. We can and should hold both the NHS and the pharmaceutical companies accountable for what they have and haven’t done.
Furthermore we should continue pursuing improved vaccines in the name of eradicating the disease. There was talk of a new vaccine called nova vax. I am now wondering what happened to it.
As for “absolving” people who didn’t get the vaccine. I am not sure what to say here. I don’t think you should guilt people over decisions they made about their own body. That’s a morally questionable thing to do. I say this as someone who got three shots of vaccine for COVID.
Your if it fully worked, the virus would have died out idea would only work if everyone in a population got vaccinated and that population didn’t have any contact with anywhere else where some people weren’t vaccinated. There weren’t any regions where everyone got vaccinated, so it’s not applicable to the real world.
Pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of epidemiology. To prevent an outbreak you need only get the r value below 1. The r value being the average number of people and infected person passes the disease onto. That’s why we were able to successfully eliminate smallpox and suppress measles and other common diseases in developed countries. Even in countries where most people got vaccinated for COVID like my home in the UK this did not happen. There are still outbreaks of the disease in places with high rates of vaccination. This tells me we are in need of either a better vaccine or a new strategy like anti virals. There was actually talk of improved vaccines like nova vax at one point.
COVID was more infectious than things like flu, and people who avoided the vaccine typically also were more likely to break lockdown and social distancing rules, so the r value managed to be close to/above one just from unvaccinated people (or people whose vaccines were for earlier strains) passing the virus on to other unvaccinated people. Breakthough cases obviously make things worse, but when one unvaccinated person typically passes it on to at least one other unvaccinated person, even if vaccinated people never got COVID again, it would still have stuck around, and that’s not the vaccine’s fault. A virus won’t go away until the r value is below one in all subpopulations.
The figures for effectiveness that were around 90% weren’t for getting the virus and passing it on, they were for getting enough of the virus to show symptoms, which for COVID, is more (hence why people kept spreading the virus and thinking they were fine). For a standard vaccine like an annual flu jab, that figure would only be around 70%. The figures that were around 99.99-100% were for effectiveness against serious infection needing breathing assistance. E.g. of the first 100,000 people in the AstraZeneca study, none of them needed breathing assistance from a COVID infection from the early strains that the initial version of that vaccine protected against. There’s never been a flu jab that effective.
Like every vaccine, it prevented sickness in some people and attenuated it in others.
The reason why COVID is still around is the same reason why the flu is still around. It mutates a lot.
COVID does not undergo as rapid antigenic shift as influenza viruses. It’s more closely related to cold viruses (hence coronavirus which are cold viruses) which generally mutate more slowly. So I don’t think this is the whole reason even if it’s part of the explanation. There are other parts of the viruses behaviour and characteristics that maybe could explain this. It doesn’t really make a difference for my point though. The vaccines were substantially less effective than promised. We also didn’t have to use experimental vaccine techniques and could have saved money by using cheaper vaccines.
Whether or not this was the case, it doesn’t absolve people who refused to get vaccinated.
Did they over-promise and under-perform? Perhaps, but you’d have to go look up who promised what and compare that with the actual effectiveness of the vaccine, and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
There are multiple clear reasons to do this actually. We have COVID inquiries in my country the UK. Part of that is looking at excessive spending on unnecessary or inappropriate equipment and corruption with regards to spending. Looking at vaccine manufacturers is important as it’s the governments job to regulate these things. They are the ones who paid for the vaccines and determined who got what type of vaccine and in what order. If there was a possibility to vaccinate people faster and more efficiently more people could have survived and our economy might not be quite so bad. It’s also possible that serious side effects caused by the vaccines could have been reduced. We can and should hold both the NHS and the pharmaceutical companies accountable for what they have and haven’t done.
Furthermore we should continue pursuing improved vaccines in the name of eradicating the disease. There was talk of a new vaccine called nova vax. I am now wondering what happened to it.
As for “absolving” people who didn’t get the vaccine. I am not sure what to say here. I don’t think you should guilt people over decisions they made about their own body. That’s a morally questionable thing to do. I say this as someone who got three shots of vaccine for COVID.
Your if it fully worked, the virus would have died out idea would only work if everyone in a population got vaccinated and that population didn’t have any contact with anywhere else where some people weren’t vaccinated. There weren’t any regions where everyone got vaccinated, so it’s not applicable to the real world.
Pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of epidemiology. To prevent an outbreak you need only get the r value below 1. The r value being the average number of people and infected person passes the disease onto. That’s why we were able to successfully eliminate smallpox and suppress measles and other common diseases in developed countries. Even in countries where most people got vaccinated for COVID like my home in the UK this did not happen. There are still outbreaks of the disease in places with high rates of vaccination. This tells me we are in need of either a better vaccine or a new strategy like anti virals. There was actually talk of improved vaccines like nova vax at one point.
COVID was more infectious than things like flu, and people who avoided the vaccine typically also were more likely to break lockdown and social distancing rules, so the r value managed to be close to/above one just from unvaccinated people (or people whose vaccines were for earlier strains) passing the virus on to other unvaccinated people. Breakthough cases obviously make things worse, but when one unvaccinated person typically passes it on to at least one other unvaccinated person, even if vaccinated people never got COVID again, it would still have stuck around, and that’s not the vaccine’s fault. A virus won’t go away until the r value is below one in all subpopulations.
The figures for effectiveness that were around 90% weren’t for getting the virus and passing it on, they were for getting enough of the virus to show symptoms, which for COVID, is more (hence why people kept spreading the virus and thinking they were fine). For a standard vaccine like an annual flu jab, that figure would only be around 70%. The figures that were around 99.99-100% were for effectiveness against serious infection needing breathing assistance. E.g. of the first 100,000 people in the AstraZeneca study, none of them needed breathing assistance from a COVID infection from the early strains that the initial version of that vaccine protected against. There’s never been a flu jab that effective.