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It cannot stop transmission, clearly. The country is mostly vaccinated and cases continue, no herd immunity ever showed up. The vaccines do reduce transmission
by spfzero 4y ago
It cannot stop transmission, clearly. The country is mostly vaccinated and cases continue, no herd immunity ever showed up.
The vaccines do reduce transmission in the minority of cases where full-blown symptoms last long enough that the reduction in infection length conferred by the vaccine is significant. But for most cases, they never progress to the point that the antibody response would become a factor, so most vaccinated people spread it just as much as if they were never vaccinated, in the early portion of their infection at minimum. So even if everyone got their booster today at the same instant, and every 6 months repeated that, it would still not stop the free movement of the virus among the population.
The only way to stop the spread is to do what China is doing, but with air-tight effectiveness, which is impossible.
That said, there's a big reason to get vaccinated and boosted anyway if you are in a risk group, since it is somewhat effective in protecting against serious and deadly outcomes.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago> It cannot stop transmission, clearly. The country is mostly vaccinated and cases continue, no herd immunity ever showed up. This is a miststament.
- spfzero 4y agoYou quoted two statements. For the first, I'm not going to further defend it, see above, it is widely accepted these days. For the second statement there are two assertions, that the country is mostly vaccinated, and that no herd immunity ever showed up. The country is mostly vaccinated, so I think you must be questioning whether herd immunity showed up. I do think some amount of immunity showed up, if by immunity you mean spreading a little bit of Covid but not as much as if you had not been vaccinated and were unfortunate enough to get a serious case of it. But I'm not sure that would qualify as "herd immunity".
- bluGill 4y agoYou often need 90% of the county vaccinated at once to get herd immunity. We are not that high.
- bluGill 4y agoWhile nobody knows the numbers required, we didn't get enough vaccinations for herd immunity.
- spfzero 4y agoYou can't get herd immunity from a vaccine that does not stop the spread of the disease, even with 100% coverage. Covid starts spreading early in the infection, before your vaccine-stimulated antibodies get into the action. For that kind of contagion, vaccines cannot stop the spread. For other diseases that become contagious later in the infection, vaccines can, and at the outset it seemed like Covid might behave that way, but it turned out not to. What the current vaccines can do, is lessen the possibility of serious outcomes, which is great.