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> When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms. Most vaccines are broadly comparable to the Covid vaccines in this respect, requiring multiple doses over months or years and often not entirely blocking infection. They are not perfect at preventing infections or symptoms in all recipients. Indeed, many important vaccines are significantly less effective than the Covid vaccines. Then consider the many viral diseases (e.g. human coronaviruses) that we do not yet have any vaccine for at all: this is because making vaccines is hard, not because we aren’t trying. Every virus and every vaccine is different, but in broad strokes the way vaccines work is by building herd immunity in the population, enough to drop the reproductive number of a virus below 1 and prevent exponential spread through the population. (Of course, they also protect people individually. But you are the only person vaccinated you end up much less protected than if everyone else also gets vaccinated.) Covid is a particularly tricky case because (a) we were starting from limited knowledge of a novel virus and designing vaccines based on new technology, (b) this virus has mutated quickly over time, evading antibodies from vaccines and past infections, (c) this virus, especially later variants, is exceptionally contagious making it hard to drop the reproductive number of the virus below 1 by any single intervention (including vaccines, masking, mass testing, ...), (d) Covid is a very serious diseases especially for the elderly, more than an order of magnitude more dangerous than the flu. > what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated The point was saving literally tens of millions of lives. |