Pre-omicron, it did. Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination, before even getting much third dose coverage or vaccinating children.
Omicron is sufficiently immune-escaping that it changed that, but I continue to be surprised how many people don't realise that the vaccines were actually very effective at preventing infection and transmission for pre-omicron variants.
Edit: I don't mean they prevented infection and transmission 100%, obviously. But for two doses the total reduction in transmission was like 80%, and higher still for three doses. This is more than most people (other than Australians and NZers who watched vaccination bend the curves in real time) realise, from the way people talk you'd think the vaccines barely reduced infection and transmission at all.
> Australia and New Zealand were pretty much at the herd immunity threshold from vaccination.
This is false and shows you don't understand how the covid vaccines work, and you don't know what happened in Australia.
I live in Australia and we suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in the world. Cases were kept low because states closed their borders, not allowing anyone in. People were locked down in their homes, not allowing anyone out.
This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.
We had strict curfews; we had 5km travel limits enforced by cops and "ring of steel" checkpoints. It was illegal to go the beach; it was illegal to take your kids to the park; it was lawful for cops to chase and attack people for not wearing masks outside. We had overzealous state premiers granting themselves new powers. We had propaganda campaigns of fear - our government hired young actors to die slowly on ventilators... (https://youtu.be/5v0Xc4dWYH4)... when the rest of world chose constructive public health messaging, we went for "shock and awe" to scare people into not going outside.
Yet, here you are claiming we had "herd immunity"! Do you realise that not everyone takes the vaccine at the same time, and that only a small proportion of vaccinated people at any given time have the full protection offered before the vaccine fades? That window of time being as little as 4 months? Herd immunity was never more than wishful thinking.
I'm in Australia too so I'm not just watching from afar and making stuff up. You might even recognise my username from the Australian COVID subreddit. I'm fully aware how harsh the lockdowns were - I'm in Melbourne, even.
But I'm not sure what you're talking about. Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination. Yes they were long, because for most of the pandemic we didn't have vaccines.
> This went on for literally hundreds of days in some parts of the country, even those places with high vaccination rates.
That's not the case. There have been a few short and localised lockdowns since vaccination levels were high, but still mostly in specific locations where vaccination levels were lower. Certainly not anything for hundreds of days. It hasn't even been 100 days since the country got to 90% of 12+ double-dosed - it's been 57 days. The lockdowns in VIC and NSW ended around 80% double-dose coverage.
> "Yes they were long, because for most of the pandemic we didn't have vaccines."
You're just repeating the Vic government's explanation for their unreasonably long lockdowns. If I wanted that, I'd go to the Vic gov website, or turn on commercial TV news.
Sounds like you fully support the harsh lockdown policies, and believe the explanation for the lockdowns comes from irrefutable scientific reasoning. But even the federal government was telling Victoria to back off with lockdowns. Not all experts agree with each other.
But the "united front" is important for public perception, so they did a lot of work to make sure the message was consistent, even if outdated. Consistency trumps validity in Australian politics.
Here's the problem: transmission remained high, even in highly vaccinated countries before Omicron. Then when Omicron landed, transmission went up again, making a mockery of advice that insisted transmission was reduced.
Reduction of severe illness is how the vaccines earn their green tick, not transmission reduction.
The Vic chief health officer is still insisting transmission can be "stopped" (he used that word the other day). That was his justification for why children still need to wear masks at school until they're vaccinated!
The reasoning is about "vaccine perception" not public health. Perhaps they're wanting to prepare people for a life of repeated, mandated jabs and checking in everywhere. The "vaccinated economy".
When Novak was booted out, it wasn't because he was a health risk. It was because "perception". Are you talking about the role perception plays in covid rules and regulations on your subreddit? Or is it just "anti-vaxxers bad, lockdowns good" kind of thing?
> "Those lockdowns ended because of vaccination."
No. The lockdowns ended because those making the rules decided to end the lockdowns. If it were because of vaccination, we'd be locked down again because double-dose vaccination is no longer considered good protection.
Underscoring the hypocrisy of the rules, your old and waned double vax from last year still gets you into hairdressers and restaurants, yet unvaccinated people are banned from those places. There would be zero risk difference, but because the government wants everyone vaccinated to the amount they dictate, the rules remain in place. Not because of science, but because of perception and behavioral control over the population.
Politicians and their side-kick health officers use blunt instruments like mandates because they don't know what else to do, so they throw kitchen sink and tell people it's science and "keeping people safe".
There were breakthrough cases pre-omicron, but apparently less.
What was very dishonest in the way this whole thing has been handled and portrayed is that Coronavirus vaccine escape-variants were completely foreseeable and therefore no surprise.
And still, the best backtrace we can find for omicron leads far away from any vaccinated populations. Just pointing out because your words seem to lean suggestively towards implying a causal relationship.
You know what might, perhaps have prevented omicron? The whole world going "China" January/February/March 2020. But only perhaps, because OG SarsCov2 was so capable of jumping between species that it would have likely just held out across any length of lockdown in animal populations. Try putting squirrels on lockdown...
Speaking of species, I'd love to see numbers about cross-species infection about delta and omicron: are they still jack of trades or did they lose that capability while acing human microbiology?
You need to provide sources. Even before Omnicron, protection against Delta infection and transmission wasn’t that great. And Delta started to spread before vaccines were widely available. It was unavoidable.
I guess with new omicron specific vaccines we may get back to that. Bit late for much of the world but it could help in areas where it hasn't really happened yet.
Why is this downvoted? It's technically correct and supported by studies (look it up). Vaccinated people can and do get and transmit the virus. Frequently without even realizing it.
It doesn't mean vaccination isn't required as it's proven to significantly reduce mortality especially among the older population.
That doesn't prevent it from being misleading. Both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can get and transmit the virus in the same sense that both I and Sidney Crosby can play hockey.
That failure to acknowledge anything besides "complete prevention" v. "not complete prevention", as if to imply that vaccination is entirely useless for preventing infection and transmission, is why people - myself included - are downvoting the above comment. To assert that vaccinated people can transmit COVID without providing the necessary context re: actual probability of that happening relative to unvaccinated persons is to lie by omission.
People are downvoting this because something like 2-4 weeks ago The Science said this was disinformation. It takes time for the reverse in course to propagate.
This Danish study (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...) of Omicron household secondary attack rates found a 52% reduction in susceptibility for boosted individuals and a 51% reduction in transmissibility from boosted individuals.
In other words, if both the infected person and the household member were boosted, the likelihood of a household member becoming infected was reduced by 74% compared to if both were unvaccinated. (This number is for Omicron, for Delta the reduction is even higher at 92%.)
In other words, while you are technically correct that the vaccines do not completely prevent infection or transmission, they do, in fact, significantly reduce the likelihood.
It probably does reduce transmission because it helps your body defeat it more rapidly, in some cases so quickly that you don't even notice you had it. More rapidly = less time to transmit it to other people.
I've seen reports that say that if you have Covid, you transmit it as easily as anyone else, regardless of vaccination status.
That is why we see so many people saying that the vaccines don't prevent you from spreading it.
However, if you're vaccinated, you're less likely to get it in the first place, so from a standing start, you're less likely to transmit it. And since at some point everyone was covid-free, this is the important scenario.
Nobody who knows they have the virus should knowingly go near another person except in an emergency. Nothing you do will protect that other person.
> I've seen reports that say that if you have Covid, you transmit it as easily as anyone else, regardless of vaccination status.
While you're indeed infected, yes. If that duration for vaccinated persons is shorter than the duration for unvaccinated persons, then the obvious deduction would be that the shortened duration results in a lowered overall chance of spread - even if (indeed, especially if) the viral loads are equal (as vaccine-skeptics like to assert as if it's some sort of "gotcha"). Transmission is a function of viral load × time, so shorter time = shorter window of transmission = less risk of transmission.
Factor in the reduced chance of being infected in the first place (as you point out), and it becomes obvious on both fronts that vaccination reduces the spread of COVID, Omicron included.
On the third hand, if you're unvaccinated this long after vaccines have become generally available, that tends to correlate with ignoring symptoms as "allergies" or "seasonal cold" and ignoring the possibility that you're infected. The people dragging their feet on getting vaccinated ain't typically the ones taking quarantines seriously.
