Quote:
Originally Posted by jfman
No need for me to nit pick, you've acknowledged yourself it's hypothetical. And the theory is sound, now if someone could develop a vaccine that had efficacy against infection, that'd be nice and I'd be in the queue.
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The science about how a vaccine works is pretty well established though.
None of them actually prevent anything, they just reduce the risk of getting it. That's the case for any covid vaccine and indeed the ones against other illnesses.
We're just noticing it more with covid as the virus has changed and the number of infections is high enough for even a 99% successful vaccine to still allow 1 in every 100 infections to break through protection. If 100k people are getting covid a day as was happening last winter then 1. the vaccine is going to prevent a lot of these no matter how effective it is 2. the majority of these are going to be prevented from serious illness by having a better immune response
If you think of other illnesses there isn't a vaccine against norovirus because the virus mutates often enough so it can't really work and also there isn't really much benefit from vaccinating against something which just gives you a bad stomach for a couple of days then stops in most people, flu vaccines are different as they are targeting a predicted strain which they think might go round and if this is wrong a lot will still get it and even some vaccinated people will still get flu.
Think of immune response to a vaccine as meeting someone for the first time. You have a photo of them which was taken last month and have to pick them out from a crowd and take them somewhere. Now if you have a recent photo this won't take long and will be quite easy. Now imagine the photo is 5 years old. It's still that person but they might be a bit fatter, hair might have gone a bit grey, they might need to wear glasses now, this takes longer. Now imagine the building's on fire and you need to recognise them and get them out before too much burns... Or they need to be somewhere quickly to stop the fire. The more recent photo is likely to mean the fire causes less damage. This is why the older vaccines are less useful now.
Quite frankly I don't see the point in offering anyone the vaccines which aren't bivalent now, unless there's a clinical reason why you can't. They need to join masks and lockdowns in the "things which don't work now" pile.