GetBuLLish wrote:Clint Eastwood wrote:The world has lost its mind and forgotten its original purpose. Vaccinating everyone is designed to make this disease less dangerous. It never was going to completely prevent disease. Now that everyone vaccinated is at very low risk for severe disease, why are we taking any precautions at all? Why do you need to sit out 10 days if you test positive? With influenza, this was never done and a vaccinated covid patient is similar to an unvaccinated influenza patient. And we don’t go around testing all people for influenza. I suspect that in years past, if we tested for influenza like we test for covid, we would have just as many people out and the whole league would have to shut down.
I agree with most of this, except the underlined part. The covid vaccines were explicitly touted as stopping people from getting infected. This trait was the basis of all the vaccine mandates and, of course, turned out to be completely false.
They were never touted as *completely* preventing disease and the fact that they were 95% effective against alpha was an initial huge shock, when something more like a traditional flu vaccine rate of efficacy had been effective. But given the small initial breakthrough rate, expectations did sort of shift into “the pandemic is over for the vaccinated.”
The thing is, the vaccines remain just as effective as ever against the virus they were designed to stop. What happened is new variants came out - variants against which the virus was not developed. We’re all lucky that the vaccines still make getting infected with these variants not a huge deal for most. I agree it’s frustrating given how hopeful we were when the vaccines were first deployed, though.
The other thing to keep in mind is that something like 2/3 of these athletes testing positive have no symptoms at all. This seems sort of like “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” If the vaccines don’t stop you from *testing* positive, but the majority of people who are not tested regularly unless they feel symptoms are going to get COVID and never know it, how much does it matter? As a vaxxed and boosted person, at this point, I realize there’s a decent enough chance I’ve had COVID and never knew it.
