"Wild success"? That isn't helpful. While I don't agree with previous comment implying obvious and severe harm from vaccines, it's well known that kids rarely get sick from covid. It's well known the vaccine effectiveness wanes in a short time, and doesn't stop symptomatic infection, and is doing very little to stop transmission. It's only real benefit is prevention of serious illness in those most vulnerable. Given these facts, you can't blame people for not wanting to jab their kids with covid vaccines.
Assumed GP was talking about vaccines in general. But the COVID vaccines alone has an order of magnitude impact on body count, before you even look at reducing severity, reducing spread, and the other benefits.
Hard for me to consider that anything other than a wild success. Is it perfect? Of course not. Do I wish it was better? Obviously. But it reduced the risk of COVID significantly for a huge number of people.
Those of us in countries that had successful lockdowns look at the mortality rate of those that were not able or willing to do so & pretty thankful we were able to postpone the virus until the vaccine was deployed.
Many who blanket-praise the vaccine as you have, are doing so from a pre-existing "team sport" position on the subject. I'm not saying you are, but it's common.
I live in a place which has the unfortunate claim of longest, harshest lockdown in the world (Victoria, Australia). Multiple lengthy lockdowns, curfews, masks outside enforced by cops, sitting on the beach was illegal, taking kids to park illegal; people were literally chased down the street by cops demanding to "see your papers". Many cops resigned, and now in 2022 Victoria is struggling to find new recruits after a mass exodus of cops - many of whom did not agree with the job they were ordered to do.
Most people here do not consider those lockdowns a "success", and experts including epidemiologists have referred to our lockdowns as "draconian", and harmful.
Now, in 2022 we have more covid deaths than before, and that's with a very high rate of vaccination in the community, particularly the older age groups. But they're still dying at a record rate. The virus still spreads and still takes out vaccinated and boosted victims. Therefore, I would never adopt the blanket "thankful" rhetoric that you've shared. Thankful for lockdowns, thankful for mandates, thankful for what is frankly, an underwhelming vaccine compared to other vaccines. Yet, "saved millions of lives" is the go-to catch-phrase, and anything else can't possibly be true. Can it.
I'll cheer lead vaccines from a team sport position all day long; in this case I'm doing so from that perspective and from the perspective that the vaccine has shown to have a significant (order of magnitude) impact on death (etc, etc).
I don't think it's totally unfair to call it 'underwhelming' though. We are so used to vaccines being wildly successful at stamping out a bunch of diseases that when something as virulent as this comes along & the efficacy isn't as high (in no small part due to the fact that so many countries decided to make it the only line of defence), it's easy to be disillusioned.
I live in Queensland, Australia, where we had lockdowns that were similar in harshness but much more limited in length. I am very familiar with the Melbourne lockdowns (one of my colleagues got stuck there for months after he got trapped there after going down for a 1 week holiday).
We probably just got lucky that we didn't have a Melbourne-style outbreak. But the simple fact is the lockdowns prevented us from having a widespread outbreak before the vaccine was deployed. The lockdowns sucked but my anecdata from my network (certainly generally privileged people whose careers were not wildly affected, so not a representative sample) was the lockdowns were worth it.
It is trivial to look at mortality rate data between, say, US/UK and Australia to see the impact that the lockdowns had. It's simply undeniable that they saved lives. People complaining loudly about 'draconian' tend, in my experience, to be dipshit libertarians that would never brook any lockdowns under any circumstances simply because of their insane political views. Others complaining about lockdowns not working tend to be talking about their own lockdowns in their own contexts which were not as harsh as Melbourne (which, arguably, ended up working).
Of course we have more COVID deaths than before - we've dialled back all the preventions! The policy decision was made to let COVID run free through society and that the vaccines (which we both agree are imperfect, but perhaps I'm the only one that acknowledges they're vastly better than nothing) were the only mitigation that we're apparently willing to tolerate.
We've done fuck all about it and everyone seems surprised that the body count is still so high. I don't know why people are still surprised people are dying - we've clearly decided the policy position is to sacrifice people on the altar of the economy and that people are bored of dealing with COVID. We're not bothering with other mitigations despite it being a top 5 cause of death in Australia (top 3 in the US?).
All you've done is double-down on "lockdowns are worth it", and assigned slurs for those who called them draconian.
The pursuit of being a responsible citizen can cause people to find themselves in the red zone. Pushed by coercive campaigns designed to make you not only think and act a certain way, but also spread the message and attack those who disagree. It's fascinating stuff.
"Dipshit libertarians"? Wow. I do wonder where the line is, if any, for those loyal to whatever lockdown rules are enforced. 100 days at 2 hours of outdoor exercise per day? Or are you the ambassador of compliance, willing to sign on to 500 days lockdown, 9pm curfew, and 5km travel limit from home.
It so happens that one of those "dipshit libertarians" who used the word "draconian", is professor Adrian Esterman. He appeared on TV in Australia many times during the pandemic, encouraging vaccines and encouraging preventative measures. He promoted caution and safety every time. But even he used the word draconian in an interview to say "no, we don't need draconian lockdowns" when asked recently whether lockdowns are needed again.
> "Of course we have more COVID deaths than before"
What do you mean "of course"? If you're suggesting everything that has happened was expected, you'd be wrong. Experts have REPEATEDLY said the virus has surprised us and behaved in unpredictable ways. The increased deaths in Australia this year were NOT expected.
And finally, part of the data about vaccines saving lives, comes from the over-represented numbers of unvaccinated people ending up in hospital. Early on at least, this was repeated often, with the footnote jab "pandemic of the unvaccinated". While the statistic is generally accepted, there are many factors involved in why certain people end up in hospital with covid. You may not have considered that unvaccinated people were more likely to take LESS precautions in general. After all, they didn't bother getting vaccinated, even though they were in the high risk age group. So they wouldn't take precautions with social distance, or hand sanitizing, or reducing social events. Those who quickly got vaccinated however, would be more likely to be cautious - therefore stay at home, social distance, and generally avoid the virus. But was anything like this discussed in relation to higher representation in hospital? No way. Nothing like that was ever discussed because they were so focused on pro-vaccine messaging. All we were left with was "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and a large group-think onboarding of that message, the remnants of which still can be found in posts such as yours.
