Yes, maybe. I think that there is no good data that supports that for people under 70 without co-morbidities.

> However, the point has also been made that being vaccinated helps prevent more serious illness[1] which in turn can help prevent hospitals from collapsing under the weight of the severely ill.

Recently I found out that in my country at the peak of the most deadly wave only 5% of patients in hospitals were admitted because of Covid.

It does not prevent transmission, it does not stop hospitals from being overfilled and it does not stop symptomatic disease. What is a good science-based reason for mandatory vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 for everyone?

The fact that you had mild symptoms, or any sort of symptoms for that matter, while vaccinated does not actually imply that you would have been substantially worse off without the vaccine, given the statistical likelihood of mild infection.

This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.

Omicron is 90% less deadly than delta for unvaccinated people and there is a 100% lower risk to need mechanical ventilation, according to this paper:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.11.22269045v...

During the delta wave covid survivors had better immunization than people with only vaccination. This contradicts some of the mandates that are currently in place, such as in Germany, were people who previously recovered are still required to get a subsequent shot:

https://news.yahoo.com/natural-immunity-more-potent-vaccines...

> This isn't the damn plague and it's high time we stopped acting like it was.

During the pandemic I looked up information about the public reaction to the Spanish Flu. It was almost exactly the same, including vaccines with unclear efficacy and anti-mask groups. However, the Spanish Flu killed up to 50 million people while the world's population was only 1.6 billion and it only took a couple of months.

Some non-clinical studies suggested a drop in transmission (e.g. CDC study in spring 2021 which examined healthcare workers who got the jab early and were tested weekly), but it's clear now they were just picking up a transient effect, months long but wearing off thereafter.

So the mRNA vaccines are doing exactly what they were trialled to do 1.5 years ago. What your local politicians and public health authorities misunderstood from that is their problem.

AND also my problem.

Did you get this from an official source? I mean, no-one should have stated this because it is simply not true, nor has been for most common vaccins out there. At least in my country none of the official sources nor epidemiologists nor virologists ever said this. They'd only go as close as stating 'can prevent transmission in xx% of cases' or something like that.

Are organizations still making policy decisions based on the specifics of the original application implications? Or from observation that it only notably reduces hospitalizations / symptom severity?

If the former is the case, that would warrant clarity, but I also have no idea what a resubmission process looks like. Is that a one week turnaround? Or is it six months with no vaccines being able to be distributed?

The vaccine helps to prepare your immune system to deal with the virus - in some cases that means it can fight it off entirely, or in other cases it will be able to fight it off quicker and your symptoms will be milder because your body is prepared.

e.g. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427

> On November 30, 2020, ModernaTX (the Sponsor, also referred to as Moderna) submitted an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) request to FDA for an investigational COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273) intended to prevent COVID-19 caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

https://www.fda.gov/media/144673/download

I realize that you don't want to admit having been so wrong about this for so long but the evidence is very clear that the vaccines are safe and effective:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#covidnet-hospitali...

Here's a VAERS entry about a patient turning getting abducted by aliens and turning into the Incredible Hulk after the MMR vaccine. https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?IDNUMBER=221...

Reasoning from VAERS without controlled studies is, at best, like cutting the ends off a roast before you bake it because you heard your grandmother did it that way. At worst, it's like irradiating a spider and enticing it to bite you because you read once that somebody got spider powers that way.

Also VAERS is not the only data source we have for vaccine safety, it’s our hypothesis generation system. We have good data from the vaccine safety datalink system that let us actually quantify the risk of different side effects. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072

https://labeling.pfizer.com/ShowLabeling.aspx?id=14471&forma...

> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 5 years of age and older.

https://www.modernatx.com/covid19vaccine-eua/eua-fact-sheet-...

> The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, MODERNA COVID-19 VACCINE, for active immunization to prevent COVID-19 in individuals 18 years of age and older.

https://www.fda.gov/media/146305/download

> You are being offered the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine to prevent Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2. This Fact Sheet contains information to help you understand the risks and benefits of receiving the Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine, which you may receive because there is currently a pandemic of COVID-19.

The real question should be, why do you refuse to even just acknowledge basic facts right from the official EUAs? They are for prevention, not for lessening symptoms, and they simply are not preventing COVID-19 with Omicron.

> Note: Confirmed cases were determined by Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and at least 1 symptom consistent with COVID-19 (symptoms included: fever; new or increased cough; new or increased shortness of breath; chills; new or increased muscle pain; new loss of taste or smell; sore throat; diarrhea; vomiting)

That’s kind of squishy, but I think it’s a clear distinction.

I agree that the effectiveness against symptomatic Covid is lower with omicron, but omicron also evades immunity from prior infection as well.