I'm not a virologist, but I interpret "omicron has a likelihood of 88% to escape current vaccines" as being rather ineffective. I've not found similar stats for Delta or other, but the authors of this paper seem to indicate that current vaccines aren't great against omicron.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jcim.1c01451#

Thanks for the source, I've been so curious about this information but it's hard to find.

I should have said "relatively effective", since I'm also under the impression that the vaccines weren't super effective at reducing transmission of the original variant (compared to vaccines against other infections). But I also haven't seen much data, I vaguely remember hearing something from the WHO like "60% effective at reducing transmission of original variant, 40% effective against Delta", but I don't remember.

The real problem is the word “vaccine”. The mRNA vaccines do not really work in a way that other vaccines do, and more importantly how we understand other vaccines to work.

Prior to this pandemic the layman understanding of a vaccine was that they generally prevented you from “contracting” the disease. You get the shot, you don’t get the disease. We were basically sold this notion for the mRNA vaccines early in 2021. However, the reality was different. Whether by way of mutation, or simply by the way the mRNA vaccines only work against a specific portion of the virus, mRNA tech seems to not be as effective at the prevention of infection but better at the prevention of severe infection. In essence, it’s not a “vaccine” as the public understood the word. However, it is a tool, and still a relevant one in diminishing the severity of the pandemic, it’s just a shame that the expectations that were set were way off.

The issue isn’t with mRNA vaccines. There are conventional vaccines for COVID used in other countries like China and they’re even less effective. It seems to have more to do with respiratory viruses or coronaviruses specifically.

I also don’t know of a time in history where a vaccine was developed for an emerging disease as opposed to one that was already endemic with a lot of natural immunity around.

TL;DR: I agree that the public thought vaccine = no more virus. But I'm not sure if traditional vaccines actually mean that you're incapable of spreading it, or even getting sick in some cases.

I agree that the public was misled as to how effective vaccines would be at preventing transmission. Especially when the CDC said that fully vaccinated people didn't need to wear masks.

But how much more effective are traditional vaccines at preventing spread of illnesses? Wikipedia pointed me to this CDC page:

> The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective. [0]

[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/measles/index.html

I was always under the impression that traditional vaccines were really effective, enough that the virus stops spreading eventually, but not enough that you are almost totally incapable of spreading the virus or even getting sick. Like the outbreaks in disneyland, obviously they only happened because of people being unvaccinated, but my understanding is that vaccinated people can still get sick from it. I found this Washington Post article:

> A 2015 measles outbreak linked to Disneyland led to 147 cases in multiple states as well as in Mexico and Canada. Many of those who were sickened were unvaccinated or did not know their vaccine record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/08/24/tourist-inf...

I think if the covid vaccines managed to have a MMR level (90%+) preventive effect against symptomatic infection rather than 20% (I can’t find where I read that stat, it might be wrong, but I don’t think by much) against symptomatic infection, you would find less skepticism in the existing covid vaccines.

At this stage, despite being fully vaccinated and boosted, I absolutely expect to be exposed to and symptomatic from Omicron in the next 45 days.

What do you mean by "skepticism in the existing covid vaccines"? Are you saying that people are disapointed that the vaccines aren't better at preventing disease and spread? I'm pretty sure that everyone falls into that category. But is there anything better available? Is there any better strategy than trying to continue to improve the vaccines and do more research hoping to someday get a handle on this?

If we compare these vaccines to non-existent ones that we believe should be better, then we are disappointed. If we compare them to the possibility of having developed worse vaccines, then we would be elated.

I mean that when you advertise that something is going to do a thing (end the disease; prevent them from catching it), encouraging people to get the vaccine because of those benefits. Then the reality is discovered to be that it doesn’t do any of those things, but it does provide a milder experience…and oh by the way, and that efficacy only lasts a few months, so go get another booster dose ASAP.

That makes people skeptical.

Right now I know probably 5-6x the number of vaccinated people who have had Covid post vaccination than people who had it prior to the vaccine being available. I know unvaccinated people who have never had Covid, and vaccinated people who have had it twice…post vaccination.

Am I vaccinated, yes. Am I skeptical of the existing vaccines to prevent me from getting Covid and ending the pandemic, yes.

> I mean that when you advertise that something is going to do a thing (end the disease; prevent them from catching it), encouraging people to get the vaccine because of those benefits.

Maybe we have different sources of information. I've never heard anyone claim that the vaccine will end the disease or prevent them from catching it. I've heard that the vaccines will decrease the likelihood of becoming sick which it does.

> Then the reality is discovered to be that it doesn’t do any of those things, but it does provide a milder experience…and oh by the way, and that efficacy only lasts a few months, so go get another booster dose ASAP.

I assume by "provide a milder experience" you mean "decrease the likelihood of becoming seriously ill". That's been the sales pitch that I heard for vaccines since the beginning. Similarly, it was never known how long the vaccines would remain effective.

> Right now I know probably 5-6x the number of vaccinated people who have had Covid post vaccination than people who had it prior to the vaccine being available. I know unvaccinated people who have never had Covid, and vaccinated people who have had it twice…post vaccination.

So what? Had those people not been vaccinated, then they probably would have been _more_ likely to develop serious disease.

I honestly just don't understand your point. The vaccines are not doing as well as many had hoped. Personally I had hoped that the entire pandemic would have gone away once vaccines became available, but that hope was clearly misplaced. But that just means that I was mistaken and that I need to change my perception of what this pandemic will mean going forward. I think you should do so as well.

> Personally I had hoped that the entire pandemic would have gone away once vaccines became available, but that hope was clearly misplaced

Where did you get that hope from? You said the information you were getting did not provide that hope, that it set expectations to what they are. If you didn’t get that idea from the authorities touting the vaccine…where did you get it? Likely it was the assumption that these vaccines would work like all the others.

That is my point.

> If you didn’t get that idea from the authorities touting the vaccine…where did you get it?

It was optimism. I was hoping that the strains wouldn't evolve so quickly. My optimism was misplaced.

> Likely it was the assumption that these vaccines would work like all the others.

Ignoring the methods (e.g. mrna), this vaccine _does_ work like all the others. It increases the likelihood that your body will be able to successfully fight off an infection without it progressing to serious/dangerous illness. What vaccine doesn't work this way? All viruses/bacteria roughly do the following:

1. They infect some percentage of people. 2. After some period of time they eventually make those people contagious (so spread is possible). 2. They mutate at a certain rate.

If viruses mutate very quickly, vaccines have trouble dealing with them. If they are highly contagious they have a lot of opportunity to spread and mutate. If they are able to quickly make hosts highly contagious then they have even more opportunity to spread an mutate.

You seem to imagine a "vaccine" to be something that is able to entirely protect a host from the disease and entirely protect a host from spreading it. This just isn't the case. The fact that there are vaccines for diseases which mutate/spread/etc. slowly enough so that you can _incorrectly_ believe this is a success of modern science. But the fact is that it never was and never will be true. Covid is a bitch and it will clearly take some time (if ever) to get it under control.

> You seem to imagine a "vaccine" to be something that is able to entirely protect a host from the disease and entirely protect a host from spreading it.

No, I simply trusted in the advertised protection against Covid infection by the mRNA vaccines would exceed 90%, I was hopeful that if I was one of the unlucky 10% to contract it, that the case would be mild. I was trusting what we were being told. When the reality set in, so did skepticism. Optimism to realism.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...

“Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people ages 18 years and older, the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.”

I guess I don’t understand someone who claims they knew that the vaccines would not be effective in stopping the spread of the virus, but were still optimistic and hopeful that the vaccines would end the pandemic. You generally don’t go from realism to optimism. It’s usually the other way around.

> Prior to this pandemic the layman understanding of a vaccine was that they generally prevented you from “contracting” the disease. You get the shot, you don’t get the disease.

afaik the flu vaccine has for decades been advertised as:

"might not always prevent, but will usually lessen symptoms"

So I'm not sure why people think this is a new thing.

The flu is understood to be different, seasonal, yearly variants. It’s also why at least in the US it’s characterized as the “flu shot” as opposed to the flu “vaccine”.

Vaccines like MMR and others are understood to be generally preventative and rarely need booster if after initial doses.

Think about things that generally require boosters…they are almost always referred to by the laymen as “shots”. Nobody calls the tetnus shot a tetnus “vaccine”.

I get what you're saying, and it makes sense, but people also often say "shots" when referring to childhood vaccines (ex: "did they get their shots yet?") They also say things like "rabies shots" and "diptet shot."

And coronavirus is also understood to be seasonal.

However, in spite of all that, I agree that the official messaging throughout this pandemic has been so inconsistent - from masking to "two weeks to flatten the curve" to "boosters" - that the public does have a right to be skeptical and exhausted.