So "little-to-nothing" is an understatement and even a fairly small percentage reduction means a lot when it applies to hundreds of millions of people. The "decrease of transmission" is really only talking about "If I'm in a room with a COVID positive person, will I get sick?" and nothing about population level "decrease of spread" because there are less contagious days per person per infection.

from https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2106757

"We provide empirical evidence suggesting that vaccination may reduce transmission by showing that vaccination of health care workers is associated with a decrease in documented cases of Covid-19 among members of their households."

So vaccines not only provide protection against worse outcomes (including the parent commenters loss of smell), but they also reduce spread, even if just through the fact that a shorter infection means less opportunity.

Caveats: study is pre-omicron, and in a population that has a higher likelyhood of previous infection (nurses). Infection followed by vaccination leads to supposed "hybrid-immunity". These findings may not translate to those who did not get infected but were vaccinated

Vaccines reduce overall levels of disease and therefore viral transmission; that's completely false. Transmissibility of SARS‑CoV‑2 can be hard to measure since asymptomatic people can be highly infectious.

COVID-19 vaccination with an mRNA-based vaccine showed a significant association with reduced risk of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7989519/

I do read carefully. The truth is in the middle. Vaccines don't prevent spread, as out establishment kept insisting to get everyone vaccinated. They do decrease spread.

Managed rationally, this means:

1) Vaccines aren't a reason to reduce other precautions, if you're worried about spread.

2) They are an important part of the solution. Being outdoors doesn't stop spread. High-filtration masks, used by untrained people, don't stop spread. Vaccines don't stop spread. Combine them? R0<<1, and we're all okay.

They do however have a large effect on the severity of the disease if you do catch it. Anecdotally at least, loss of smell is much less common amongst those vaccinated.

Not minor. The anti-mandate argument rests on this fact. One that is not in dispute among experts yet is widely ignored by policymakers and HN commenters.