We’re already at a point where almost everyone has either been vaccinated or infected, but neither prevents you from getting sick again or from transmitting covid without realizing you are sick. IIRC the herd immunity stuff people were talking about at the beginning was being hopeful that transmission could be reduced enough to stop the virus from sustaining itself in the population, but it turned out to be too infectious for that to work. Not to say it isn’t worth getting vaccinated to reduce your own chance and severity of illness but at this point will it really be making that much difference in how many people get sick?
Yes, a thousand times yes.
Pardon me for being uncivil, but your ignorance is violence. People like you are the reason people like me (immunocompromised) have died. Even years after the first infection, in the face of mountains of data and the advice of experts, you’re still sharing moronic, anri-intellectual talking points spread by conservatives to help them stay in power.
A vaccine does not eliminate your chances of getting sick, it reduces your chances of getting sick. Herd immunity was both achievable and observed in communities that weren’t run by dipshits. You do not remember correctly.
If everyone had actually gotten vaccinated, it would have saved countless lives and shortened the pandemic. We know this because there are countries that handled the pandemic better than we did, saw fewer deaths, recovered more quickly, and did not experience second- or third-wave variant outbreaks.
I think you’re making a lot of uncharitable assumptions about what I’m saying, which definitely isn’t that it would have been useless to get everyone vaccinated sooner. Taking all available precautions to reduce transmission is of course what should have been done.
I remember people talking about herd immunity as an argument that we should avoid any lockdowns so everyone gets infected and get it over with sooner, because they will then have enough resistance to end the disease in the population. What I mean by ‘it turned out to be too infectious’ is that the pandemic now continues despite most people having gotten sick, not that efforts to reduce transmission did nothing to help save people.
The main point I’m wondering about here is more about the current role of vaccines, now that almost everyone has an immune system that is familiar with covid. I’m not even asking about this rhetorically, just skeptical that the same logic still applies that did earlier.
We aren’t going for full herd immunity any more since that horse has bolted, but there’s really no scientific doubt that continued vaccination is reducing the spread and the severity of infections. It’s not difficult to find the many studies that have been published on this.
It will keep going as the virus mutates and vaccinations lapse.