[belorn]

What has been generally disproved is the concept of herd immunity. Initially this was what scientists and researchers had hoped would occur with vaccinations, and sadly for multiple reasons this did not happen.

Vaccines does significant help in reducing the severity when a person get sick, which reduces the work load on the health care system and allowing the personal to focus their time and skill on people in worse conditions. That is great, but it changes the initial strategy in terms of application and goal.

[didibus]

True, though from my understanding, in some sense herd immunity was reached for the original strain and even delta, both of which are pretty much eradicated from the US.

Those were the deadliest strains as well.

What happened is that COVID started mutating much faster than expected in ways that it can avoid the immune system.