I think confusion comes from the use of “COVID-19” which is not a virus or infection specifically but a disease caused by sars-ncov2 infection. If you have an asymptomaic infection, you don’t have COVID-19.
There is a bit of rewriting now that is happening that is a bit disturbing and seems like gaslighting. A notion that the vaccine never sought to prevent infection (and thus viral transmission). That is obviously and easily proven as completely wrong.
But then protection faded maybe quicker than expected, and variants broke expectations and some protections. It sucks, but it's where we're at. The vaccines still have the enormous benefit of reducing case severity, but they certainly did fail in some of the goals.
Sidenote: If you are infected and thus replicating SARS-CoV-2 viruses, you have COVID-19 even if entirely asymptomatic. As with the prior points, this is trivial to verify. The "COVID-19 is only severe cases" claim is a part of the prior bit of gaslighting where we're redefining everything to somehow make early proclamations (e.g. "prevents covid-19") fit the unfortunate situation today.
Cheers!
It's fascinating how two years into this pandemic this is still such a huge communication issue, quite reminiscent of AIDS and HIV.
I wonder how much of that is impacting the reported numbers, in Germany it sure enough did; Hospitals were reporting every patient that tested positive as COVID-19 patient, even when they where in the hospital for a completely different reason and had no disease outbreak.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1480679058488836097
Also note at the end he says "asymptomatic covid", which gets right back to the confusion between sars-cov-2 and covid-19.
If the vaccine had come out of the gates as something to just prevent death, I would not have been so enthusiastic or motivated.
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Unfortunately, some politicians then started making wild claims about infection prevention that weren't backed by actual science.
The original announcements from Pfizer et al touted the 90-95% effectiveness of the vaccines against infection (and 95-100% against severe infection). The idea that vaccines prevented most infection was literally part of their testing and marketing from the start. The wild card was Delta & Omicron not complying with those numbers, not that people shared some mass delusion.