> They've already backpedaled the vaccine story from stopping transmission to preventing the most severe symptoms.
In practice, we have always, always, always known that vaccination did not stop transmission but simply made cases significantly less severe. Unfortunately that is not what was communicated, and many parties basically lied and said the vaccine stopped transmission.
This is the third time by my count that an official lie about covid was spoken, proven wrong, and recanted. I'm very pro-vaccine, but by god we need to stop lying to people.
> The official numbers say kids under 18 don't die from this virus.
Yeah, kids are basically fine. Vaccinations don't hurt them but they're a really low risk group to begin with. The mask thing is silly for kids - you can kind of make an argument it helps protect teachers/babysitters/etc, but that is a group that should be mandated to be vaccinated in the first place.
> Yet they are still pushing these admittedly non-neutralizing vaccines on children as young as 5 and talking about mandates for them as well?
Kids being vaccinated results in no harm. It may, depending on long term protection plays out, save them having to worry about getting vaccinated as an adult. For lots of reasons, mostly tied to schooling, we're pretty good about getting kids vaccinated and really bad about getting adults vaccinated, so it's generally desirable to get all the life-long (or really long lived) vaccines into kids, even if they don't need them immediately.
> In practice, we have always, always, always known that vaccination did not stop transmission
Since this is something people commonly write around here, I am truly curious to know what you read that lead you to believe this? It's weird how many people believe the vaccine is not effective in stopping transmission. It's not 100% effective, and how well it's working to prevent transmission is a moving target as the virus changes, but if you think the effectiveness number is zero percent, I would like to understand where you got that. I'm pretty sure the official numbers are still above ninety percent, even with Omicron.
(it is of course true as you hinted that the vaccinated have less severe cases and shed less virus, etc.)
To be more specific, vaccination does help reduce transmission, partially, for a short period of time, but it's reduction in transmission is low compared to it's significant reduction in severity.
To be clear, it's totally fine that the vaccine doesn't really do much for transmission. That's not the goal. Covid is certainly here to stay and it's probably going to be a seasonal illness much like the flu - and we might even see seasonal covid shots like we do with the flu. We only care that the severity and hospitalizations are kept low. The vaccines do accomplish that and with basically no side effects.
I appreciate your sharing it but I'm not sure what I should be getting from that citation of the Israeli study, since I already knew that the vaccine wasn't 100% effective in preventing transmission and that the effect of the vaccine wanes over time. With official effectiveness numbers still above 90% I don't really think we should say "the vaccine doesn't really do much for transmission." (I realize the extent to which this might be an argument about verbiage and communication for me.) The immunity it provides demonstrably does an awful lot to prevent infection and transmission. And its effectiveness trends downward disappointingly fast, yes.
I don't think I disagree on the other points. I'm fairly certain you're right about seasonal COVID shots coming, and there's no doubt about the vaccine's importance in ameliorating symptoms. Communicating all this will be interesting. Something that's always been communicated poorly about influenza vaccines, for example, is that people who got a bad case of a strain they were immunized against would quite possibly have been a lot worse off without the vaccine. (Pet peeve: influenza A can be quite dangerous and that's not communicated well.)
Thanks. Back to one of your other points, the much newer stories out of Israel (I found while looking for newer data on this) mostly involve their government's very strong push for more frequent vaccinations.
In practice, we have always, always, always known that vaccination did not stop transmission but simply made cases significantly less severe. Unfortunately that is not what was communicated, and many parties basically lied and said the vaccine stopped transmission.
This is the third time by my count that an official lie about covid was spoken, proven wrong, and recanted. I'm very pro-vaccine, but by god we need to stop lying to people.
> The official numbers say kids under 18 don't die from this virus.
Yeah, kids are basically fine. Vaccinations don't hurt them but they're a really low risk group to begin with. The mask thing is silly for kids - you can kind of make an argument it helps protect teachers/babysitters/etc, but that is a group that should be mandated to be vaccinated in the first place.
> Yet they are still pushing these admittedly non-neutralizing vaccines on children as young as 5 and talking about mandates for them as well?
Kids being vaccinated results in no harm. It may, depending on long term protection plays out, save them having to worry about getting vaccinated as an adult. For lots of reasons, mostly tied to schooling, we're pretty good about getting kids vaccinated and really bad about getting adults vaccinated, so it's generally desirable to get all the life-long (or really long lived) vaccines into kids, even if they don't need them immediately.