It doesn't do as good a job as it used to, but we never had a vaccine that was 100% effective at doing either of those things. It's always been a numbers game where vaccines simply increased the odds in your favor. Before delta the vaccines gave a huge boost to your odds of not catching covid at all, but now with omicron vaccines only provide a small boost. Even now it's still better to use vaccines to increase your changes against catching the virus even though the vaccines are most effective at preventing death and hospitalization.
I was responding to a comment which said "the fact, that the 'Vaccine' no longer prevents catching the virus or transmitting it."
My problem with that statement is that it wasn't a fact. The vaccines do prevent catching the virus, just no where near as well as they used to and even at their best they never eliminated the risk of catching and transmitting the virus.
It sucks that the new variants are able to overcome so much of the protection we had from vaccines, but we always knew there was a risk that would happen if we allowed the virus to spread uncontrolled. We didn't do enough to keep the number of infections down and evolution did its thing resulting in poorer vaccine performance.
I really hope that adjustments are able to made to existing vaccines to compensate or new vaccines are developed which do a better job, but it's going to be an arms race until people stop passing this virus around by the millions every day giving it more opportunity to mutate and spread again.
Right now, the vaccines are still the best defense we have. 30% is a hard number to hear when we had 90% but 30% of 7.9 billion people is 2,370,000,000 so it can still prevent a whole lot of infections in the world and if we work harder to bring the number of infections down hopefully we can prevent things getting much worse. My biggest fear was that some variant would evade the protections we have entirely and negate the lessons we've learned in treating the sick and we'd be right back to where we were early 2020. That's still a possibility we have to be ready to face.
If you're concerned about the long term effects of the vaccine, you should be double concerned about the long term effects of the much more complex and much less understood virus.
Not necessarily, there have been reports of people being infected via central air units in large building (apartments, condos, etc.).
Albeit, I do not believe it is that common, it's still possible. However, if you isolated in a remote location in the woods miles away from humanity, then perhaps you'd be safe, I suppose.
It’s pretty uncommon for multi tenant dwellings to share a common air ducting system, at least in newer buildings. I live in an apartment and my “across the hall” neighbors did get COVID, no issues for me.
I accept that it's entirely possible that 30 years down the line we'll discover some horrific thing we've all done to ourselves by taking the vaccines. What I can say however is that we don't have any evidence that suggests that we will see major problems in the future caused by the vaccines.
What we do have evidence for are future problems caused by these coronavirus infections along with a long list of immediate problems like deaths, severe (sometimes life altering) symptoms which can at times persist for weeks, months, and years, healthcare systems being overwhelmed preventing or delaying access to care and making accessing health services more risky, etc.
If you have to choose between getting a vaccine which appears to be perfectly safe but maybe could cause harm at some point in the future, and not getting it which we know does cause harm now and is very likely to cause harm in the future the choice is pretty clear. We can only deal with the evidence we have today and our best understanding of our current situation.
Especially when the vaccines benefit us not only by keeping us healthier and helping to eliminate the strain on our healthcare systems, but they are also our best bet to help reduce the need for social restrictions and disruptions in education and the economy.
There's still always that chance that the vaccines will have some negative impact on us later, but anyone in the future looking back and seeing our current situation won't have to wonder "What were they thinking taking their chances with this new vaccine!" It should be very clear to them that because we had no indication that there would be problems with the vaccine and because the vaccines were our best option to keep ourselves and each other healthy in the face of current problems and known future problems caused by the virus it was perfectly reasonable to take the chance on the vaccines and that doing so saved many lives and prevented many problems.
And I hope that should we have to deal with any future consequences from these vaccines that we can once again turn to medical science to find the best available option to treat those problems using the best understanding of them we have at the time. A huge percentage of the global population will be impacted after all so once again we'll be in a position where the entire world has an incentive to work together to find a solution which will hopefully go even smoother next time following the lessons learned here and now.
With more research and time things could change, but until there are indications that the vaccines could cause more harm than the known harms of the virus the vaccines will remain the smartest option we have today, no matter how tragic things turn out decades later.
> I accept that it's entirely possible that 30 years down the line we'll discover some horrific thing we've all done to ourselves by taking the vaccines. What I can say however is that we don't have any evidence that suggests that we will see major problems in the future caused by the vaccines.
This is enough for me to avoid them. I didn’t read the rest because it’s a short essay.