The cited values for time post-shot to peak efficacy and the subsequent time from there to whatever threshold of efficacy you choose (and on to negative efficacy after that) are based on studies of groups of individuals. For some of the individuals, the shots were more or less effective than the mean/median/this-many-standard-devs value in preventing infection and then, as their jabs' effects weakened, in reducing viral load and symptoms that are relevant to onwards transmission.
In the absence of any widely-enforced way of measuring an individual's viral load at any given moment, many people who believe themselves to be under a covid shot's umbrella of protection are actually infected with covid and spreading it. Covid is aerosol-borne and can linger in the air for hours.
For high-risk people not living in a one-person habitat at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon, there is no avoiding covid, even if everyone around them gets a booster every three months.
There are reasons that effective vaccines for the viruses that cause the common cold (rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, et al.) and for influenza have never been developed. And everyone should have been very skeptical of authorities' "If you get this (or that) shot, you won't get or spread covid!" claims about a bunch of experimental vaccines (some since withdrawn or abandoned due to lack of uptake in the face of adverse effects or realizations about the mildness of this disease for most people) churned out in a matter of months.
It's neither accurate or factual. Genuinely high-risk people who are vaccinated but get covid fair much better than genuinely high-risk people who do not. It can literally protect them from death. You'd have to be crazy to conclude that the vaccine "does nothing to protect" them.
From my original comment: "coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people"
You are now citing an alleged benefit of lowered odds of severe illness and death to high-risk individuals from receiving the experimental vaccines themselves.
I am decrying the government coercion/disinfo efforts that bribed, bullied, shamed, and frightened low-risk persons (non-elderly, exhibiting none of the known risk factors for serious disease, in apparent good health) into getting any of these shots on the (false) pretext that doing so would prevent truly high-risk persons from contracting covid.
This is an obviously biased total misrepresentation.
The "and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people" is still a lie. What you didn't say is "coercing mostly low-risk people into submitting to experimental, liability-free vaccines that don't prevent spread and so do nothing to protect genuinely high-risk people from ever getting infected"
which would still be a lie, but much much closer to the truth. Instead you misleadingly stated what you said in such a way that it made the vaccines sound like they weren't protecting genuinely high-risk people at all which is, again, a lie.
The vaccines do protect genuinely high-risk people. It also helps prevent the spread of the virus, but at this point only a little. Against early strains of the virus the vaccines were very effective at preventing infection, but we've allowed the virus to evolve so now that's no longer the case. This wasn't a government conspiracy, it was a complex and changing situation and the CDC was very quick to inform the public once the data showed that the vaccines were not protecting against infection as well as they used to, and were also very clear about the fact that the vaccines are still (so far) highly effective at keeping people from dying and getting seriously ill.
When vaccine efficacy goes negative (you're more vulnerable to infection and become as or more symptomatic and carry as high or higher a viral load than unvaccinated) after a few months, you have to get a booster and subject yourself to the same or greater low, but non-negligible risk of known serious/fatal adverse effects in order to fingers crossed buy a few more months of protection you don't personally need but which you hope will reduce truly high-risk persons' chances of contracting covid. There may also be other, as-yet-unknown adverse effects.
How long are you willing to keep running back and forth across a minefield?
Given the situation a full run of trials would have taken far too much time.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Table 4a.
They remain quite effective against hospitalisation and death, and have saved millions of lives globally, net.
Old people should get vaccinated but the herd immunity arguments used to justify vaccination of young people are completely unjustified.
I don't blame you because the governments spread this misinformation. The CDC has recanted this misinformation.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/cdc-director-covid-...
But we also know the CDC's original position was false.
More importantly, all social media platforms universally censored the scientist who discovered the mrna vaccine because he said... they dont prevent spread.
Do you feel this will be a convincing argument?
Do note that neither the Pfizer nor Moderna vaccines actually tested risk of infection or transmission. You can download the clinical trial protocols and read what the clinical trials actually measured. Patients in the trial were only tested upon symptoms and the endpoint measured was severity of disease.
I believe it was only the J&J vaccine that actually regularly tested patients to see if there was a difference in protection against acquiring Covid. They did not test protection against transmission.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34355689/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738514/
Those studies pretty consistently found benefits in the 40-60% range against the original strain. Unfortunately, we had political opportunists discouraging adoption and then Delta and Omicron evolved so the scenario public health experts had been worried about happened.
Regarding the claim that Pfizer and Moderna didn’t test for transmission, this has been muddied substantially by its popularity as a talking point for antivax activists and right-wing pundits trying to present it as a conspiracy of some sort. In reality, Pfizer and Moderna worked with the FDA to design the phase 3 trials and they all decided to focus on protection against serious outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t look for signals in the data or that other studies weren’t in progress. All of this was clearly communicated at the time, too, so I would question the motives of anyone who tries to say it was buried – at the very least, that’s saying they get their news from untrustworthy sources.
This is covered at considerable length here:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-pfizer-covid-19-vaccine...
"We estimated a VET of 71% among household contacts of fully vaccinated index cases. Harris et al. found a VET of 40–50% for unvaccinated households contacts". They estimated it, and if using the 40-50% figure, their study found higher transmission rats among vaccinated.
It was also self-reported data they explicitly state was not collected for research purposes, "As our study used data not primarily collected for research purposes, it has some important limitations. Our data do not contain information on negative tests among contacts, therefore we do not know if contacts did not get infected or did not seek testing."
I would be careful in making any sweeping conclusions from an observational study using self-reported income.
In reality, Pfizer and Moderna worked with the FDA to design the phase 3 trials and they all decided to focus on protection against serious outcomes, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t look for signals in the data or that other studies weren’t in progress.
I agree - Pfizer and Moderna never claimed they reduced infection rates because they never tested it. Generally it was politicians who were saying "get vaccinated to protect others" based on some theoretical benefit.
Like I said, look at the Phase 3 clinical trial designs, they are public documents. Risk of infection/transmission was not captured.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22651099/
I draw your attention in particular to one of the figures: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22651099/#&gid=article-figur...
You will see that there is a great deal of variation in the number of aerosol-sized particles emitted by the individuals in this small clinical study and note that the variation between individuals is greater than the difference, for a single individual, between a person's aerosol output when ill vs. after recovery.
You can also find studies confirming that ordinary breathing constantly generates aerosols. They aren't just something produced when someone coughs or sneezes.
If you were extremely socially isolated, perhaps on a farm or in a cabin somewhere and only going into town once a month to buy some supplies or pick up your mail from a one-man post office or something, slight reductions in other persons' viral load and very conscientious use of a properly-fitted respirator and eye protection might buy you a little more time before you got infection.
But living normally, going out most days and interacting with many people and entering environments with non-negligible foot traffic from other people who have made their own respiratory contributions to the ambient air? With surgical masks or cute cloth masks and everyone having gotten some combination of the currently-available covid shots? No.
Do you mean don't reduce spread at all, or don't prevent it 100%?