Originally Posted by
Xeptu
I think the confusion arises out of what we non medical people believed a vaccination "was" prior to Covid and I'll put my hand up, I was one of them.
I understood once I had been vaccinated I couldn't be infected, at least a very low chance of that happening. It turns out as it applies to Corona Virus's, that's not the case, all it's going to do is reduce the severity, who knew.
As I read through previous posts here, there is still some that are of that same understanding. On that basis when someone says it doesn't work are they technically correct, just misguided by what it does.
Yes, for sure, I think that if you're of a certain age you might remember getting the oral polio vaccination and the tuberculosis BCG vaccination as a kid and associating that with essentially zero cases of either. Or if you've got kids of your own, associating the MMR or MMRV vaccines with essentially zero cases of any of measles, mumps, rubella or chicken pox (Varicella).
One of the big differences, of course, is that none of those vaccines or our experience of them was during a pandemic, where the targeted disease was prevalent.
Interestingly or otherwise, one of the hitherto most commonly received vaccinations is for seasonal flu. The purpose of that vaccine is not to stop infection, it is to stop an infection manifesting as a serious illness. People would sometimes get crook from an influenza infection after being vaccinated against the seasonal flu but would not be perturbed because the vaccine prevented the serious illness that is properly associated with the flu. Most people would shrug the mild presentation off as a cold. And no one got bent out of shape about it because there was no associated flu test to demonstrate that despite being vaccinated against the flu you were in fact infected by it.
That's why understanding the efficacy end point is important. What you want from a vaccine is for it to condition your immune system such that when you are infected you don't become seriously ill, don't need to be hospitalised, don't need to be admitted to ICU and don't subsequently die. Ideally it should also reduce your ability to transmit the disease if you do become infected but frankly if the vaccine is efficacious at preventing serious illness AND you have a good uptake of the vaccine in the population, forward transmission isn't as much of a concern.
And what we are seeing in the data out of places like Israel is that the vaccines are reducing hospitalisations, ICU admissions and deaths by an order of magnitude (that is, by around 90 percent).