Please show me where I discouraged vaccine use in order to encourage other measures. I’ll wait.
To be clear, I have both of my vaccines and am damn glad that I got jabbed. You’re reading my posts as anti-vax, which is the opposite. I’ve actually considered breaking the law and lying to get my third vaccine this weekend. I probably won’t because I’m seeing more and more signs that there will be recommendations for boosters pronto.
But no, I am in no way arguing against vaccines, and I’ve stated clearly that vaccines are still effective at preventing the worst outcomes - that still holds up in all of the data that have been collected across the globe. So in that sense, yes, I agree that vaccines still do their job.
I’m pointing out that we need to be a lot more vigilant at preventing the spread because the vaccines have taken a hit in terms of their effectiveness at preventing symptomatic infection – and this is where you are simply incorrect. The data you’re referring to is pre-Delta and pre-Lambda data.
Here’s an article on the data from Israel:
I’ve been on record as stating that I find Israel’s 39% efficacy figure a bit on the low end. Conversely, I find Public Health England’s data on the high end, particularly as it pertains to the U.S. Pfizer data, as the U.S. followed a vaccine process similar to that of Israel and different from the UK. The US vaccine recipients, like Israelis, waited three weeks between the first and second shot; in the UK, they waited longer, and this might have increased their efficacy. Their were/are holes or potential threats to validity in all studies, including the Israeli and PHE studies, which is why I suspect that the efficacy of the mRNA vaccines is probably somewhere in between 40 and 88%, putting it right in the neighborhood of 50-60% effectiveness at stopping transmission.
But it ain’t 90% – you very likely don’t have clusters of fully-vaccinated people getting symptomatic infection with a vaccine that’s that kind of robust. I hedge a little only because the articles haven’t said exactly what these clusters were doing. I mean, if they were taking tours of COVID wards, okay, maybe they’re exceptional. But I don’t think that’s what they were doing. They were walking around in public places, most likely without masks, like so many people I see right now, and they thought they were protected – and 60-70% of individuals in these groups got the grim news later that they weren’t.
If people get scared out of a vaccine because of facts, I can’t help that, but I would rather pass along good information so that those of us who want to continue living in a world of facts can use facts to make informed decisions to protect their own health and the health of those that matter to them.