If you are naive and not vaccinated then when you get covid you'll likely notice it, isolate and not spread it (if it is particularly severe you may be bed ridden and unable to be social). If vaccinated and getting a less severe infection you may not need to isolate and likely be more social and prone to spread it.

Yearly flu shots if they went out to the entire population would most likely create a similar problem. But with only 40% of the uptake and usually to the more vulnerable they haven't had this effect.

Mass vaccinations to a virus like polio make perfect sense because this virus is not able to mutate and still successfully infect the host. You can confer long lasting immunity with vacinations on this. The spike protein on Sars can mutate many ways to Sunday and still break through the cell wall. So your constantly reformulating and boosting and trying to keep ahead of a changing target that if left to its own devices would just peter out due to it becoming less and less severe (too severe and it dies due to less transmission, less severe get more transmission and win and the virus becomes more benign over time).

With a leaky vacccine you can be a happy chicken with a severe variant and be totally fine until your immunity wanes and the next designed booster is off the mark. See this: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-m...

There is no reason to believe it would peter out without millions of deaths and no reason to believe we can't stay ahead of variants

Have we stayed ahead of the flu?

If we vaccinate the vulnerable but ease off the rest of the population we'll be better off longer term with less harmful variants.

Yes they decrease transmission from 30-60% depending on the season and among those who still get sick you are 31% less likely to die.

This is something like saying do seat belts really work?

False equivalence; this is not the flu.

No, I agree, but it's very similar though in terms of how easily it mutates and because of that impossible to snuff out with vaccines. We should only vaccinate the vulnerable like we do with the flu.

The old and immunocompromised get the least direct benefit from the vaccination because their immune systems are weak and a large portion of the actual decrease in mortality among these groups isn't directly from the vaccination but from having fewer vectors running around spreading disease.

Furthermore Covid is believed to mutate substantially slower than the flu

> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and Alphainfluenzavirus are RNA viruses that cause coronavirus disease-19 and influenza, respectively. Both viruses infect the respiratory tract, show similar symptoms, and use surface proteins to infect the host. Influenza requires hemagglutinin and neuraminidase to infect, whereas SARS-CoV-2 uses protein S. Both viruses depend on a viral RNA polymerase to express their proteins, but only SARS-CoV-2 has a proofreading mechanism, which results in a low mutation rate compared to influenza.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33064680/

On the topic of mutations letting it spread through those who aren't AS vulnerable would give it billions of new patients and trillions of new chances to mutate while killing millions of people whose lives could have been saved by a vaccine that is safer than many people's weekly commute to work.

Just an FYI it’s possible to spread the virus even with the vaccine, so it is best to isolate and quarantine regardless of vaccination status

Yes but you are less likely to do this the less severe the infection is and you may not even notice it with the vaccination.