Also, more broadly, that people would actually be willing to get vaccinated at a rate high enough to reduce the R-value below 1.

The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread, were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about reducing susceptibility, not infectivity. I don't think there were any numbers available on the vaccine's effect on virus transmissibility. It was implicitly assumed that fewer symptoms would translate to fewer transmissions, but was this ever proven?

Point being, we didn't know what vaccination rate would reduce the R-value below 1, and FAFAIK we still don't know. Not even for the original Sars-cov-2 virus, and not for any of the variants.

Vaccination reduces transmission: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2106757

> Cases of Covid-19 were less common among household members of vaccinated health care workers during the period beginning 14 days after the first dose than during the unvaccinated period before the first dose (event rate per 100 person-years, 9.40 before the first dose and 5.93 beginning 14 days after the first dose). After the health care worker’s second dose, the rate in household members was lower still (2.98 cases per 100 person-years). These differences persisted after fitting extended Cox models that were adjusted for calendar time, geographic region, age, sex, occupational and socioeconomic factors, and underlying conditions. Relative to the period before each health care worker was vaccinated, the hazard ratio for a household member to become infected was 0.70 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.63 to 0.78) for the period beginning 14 days after the first dose and 0.46 (95% CI, 0.30 to 0.70) for the period beginning 14 days after the second dose. ... Not all the cases of Covid-19 in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker; therefore, the effect of vaccination may be larger.1 For example, if half the cases in the household members were transmitted from the health care worker, a 60% decrease in cases transmitted from health care workers would need to occur to elicit the association we observed (see the Supplementary Appendix). Vaccination was associated with a reduction in both the number of cases and the number of Covid-19–related hospitalizations in health care workers between the unvaccinated period and the period beginning 14 days after the first dose.

Given that vaccination reduces asymptomatic infection with SARS-CoV-2,2,3 it is plausible that vaccination reduces transmission; however, data from clinical trials and observational studies are lacking.

> The vaccines were never proven to reduce virus spread, were they? I mean, the clinical trials were about reducing susceptibility, not infectivity.

Populations where people are less likely to get infected are less likely to spread. You have to be infected before you can spread.

The psychology of the vaxxed asymptomatic COVID carrier cannot be left out of the equation. Whether this psychology leads one to engage in risky disease-spreading behaviour, this is for the experts to elucidate.

Maybe. On the other hand, a lot of anti vaxxers seems to think Covid-19 is a hoax, and that undoubtedly influences behavior.

Do you have a source for that? This is the first time Ive heard someone call it a hoax that was an antivaxxer. Most antivaxxers are hesitant due to the speed at which the vaccines were made, the new technology used to make them, and the fact that the companies making them can’t get sued if they kill people.

There are those type too, yes, but there are also people who think Covid is a hoax, or at least that its danger has been drastically exaggerated. There tends to be a lot of overlap between beliefs here.

So no source. Interestingly if you look up the list of global epidemics however COVID is #6 of 20, and if you sort by total global population list, COVID is #11. So it seems we have actually had worse pandemics. Maybe you’re seeing people reading the actual stats?

I haven’t seen any studies diving into anti vaxxer beliefs that deeply, no.

> Maybe you’re seeing people reading the actual stats?

What kind of reasoning is this? So because Covid-19 isn’t the worst pandemic in history, then it makes sense to believe it’s a hoax or overhyped?

I was under the same impression that vaccine would not reduce the spread or carrying of the virus. It would just greatly reduce the change you landing on the IC.

What would be the rate in question for Delta? My understanding is that it was feasible for earlier variants, but Delta has R too high to begin with.

If your focus is on R value for transmission, then you will also need to eradicate it from every single cat and deer on the planet. Good luck with that.

Also, the government knowingly ignored warnings by the RKI (german institute for public health) saying that numbers and hospital admissions will go up rapidly in autumn.