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.
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.