Are vaccines working ?

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So far more than 2 billion people or more have been vaccinated compared to last year when there were no vaccines at all globally and I know many countries have been speeding up their vaccine programs and yet we do have strains of the virus spreading and the news and media are still spreading doom and gloom which doesn't help. I do sometimes wonder if the vaccines are working and I want to believe they are working but obviously I have heard of people catching it after two doses but you may just feel rough for a week and get a better again. I seem to think whenever a new strain comes along people just get reinfected again even if they get double jabbed like my dad who caught it in December and had his jabs in March and May or June and it feels as though its implying that everything we are doing is useless. According to the UK vaccine calculator herd immunity is estimated to be reached in the UK by 4th September and the thresholds for herd immunity are different for the different strains of Covid (Delta - 80-89%, Alpha - 75-80%, Gamma - 75-80%, Original strain of 2020 - 65%). I've thought sometimes what if it loses strength and begins fade away although not disappear from the face of the earth because somewhere out there the viruses that caused pandemics in the past are still out there like Swine flu, Spanish flu, SARS, Plague etc.

Last edited by chris1989 on 04 Aug 2021, 9:08 am, edited 4 times in total.

Vaccines are working, but only for the people who receive them.

I suppose there are a small group of people with autoimmune diseases or whatever it is that can't have vaccines otherwise they'll die, so the whole world has to stop just for those people until there's a vaccine suitable for people with those immune system conditions. God knows what people with diseases that weaken the immune system to every virus out there carried on even before COVID existed. But society didn't shut down for those people.

It is the unvaccinated who are causing the spike in covid-related deaths.

That's the general idea =)
But yeah, they are kind of expecting that it won't go away, it'll just become a yearly thing, maybe with a yearly vaccine like with the flu.

I have heard of people being infected even if they have two doses, during the Euro final, the controversial TV presenter Piers Morgan caught it even though even he was fully vaccinated and said he was rather sick and was thankful to the people who made the vaccine. I used to think if you were vaccinated or immune naturally from infection, viruses would bounce off you because it recognises your anti bodies even if you were standing next to someone who was also vaccinated even though you don't know it.

You used to think wrong.  Virii do not "bounce"; they still get into your system -- which is now charged up with antibodies against the disease -- and are almost immediately attacked and neutralized.  The "bouncing" meme was the result of oversimplification (e.g., "Dumbing Down") of the description of how the vaccines actually work.  Most people seem to have no idea of how vaccines really work.

As far as I can tell, the vaccines are not one hundred percent effective, but any time I hear anything about hospitalizations/deaths due to COVID since vaccines became widely available, it’s mostly been people without vaccination who have been getting severely ill. If that’s accurate, it means that yes, there are fully vaccinated people who still get severely ill (probably even some without other conditions that may affect their susceptibility / the efficiency of the vaccine) who get severely/deathly ill from it and there are plenty of unvaccinated people who don’t get sick at all, but a vaccine still significantly reduces the probability of severe illness. Probably similar to, say, taking an antibiotic for strep throat - not taking one does not mean you certainly will have serious complications from it and taking it does not mean you absolutely won’t, but all else equal, someone taking an antibiotic is much less likely to become severely ill than someone not taking one (I know vaccines are preventative and antibiotics are treatment after contraction, that difference doesn’t really play into the intended analogy).

I also do not know if vaccinations are actually reducing contraction of the virus, or just the probability of getting sick from it but not the chance that one is a carrier, which is why I still take the same amount of precaution even though I have been fully vaccinated for months. Doesn’t hurt me any to wear a mask, keep my hands clean, etc., but it might hurt someone(s) else if I don’t.

It is the unvaccinated who are causing the current surge in covid-related deaths.

Yep, I haven’t done enough research or anything to be able to prove that, but have every reason to believe it. The point I was trying to make is that “not one hundred percent effective” is not the same as “not at all effective.”

I don't know why so many are ignorant of the Swiss Cheese:

Cool graphic.

How do vaccines prevent the spread, though?

Oh wait. Never mind. LMAO. My glasses are so bad, I read it backward. I thought the green man was coughing with a big mouth in the picture instead of wearing a mask. I thought vaccines were cited as the first step outward from him, to protect others.

I really need my eyes checked. I couldn't even see the arrow. I was looking right to left instead of left to right.

It makes sense now.

My bad.

I sometimes wonder what happens when many countries which herd immunity in their populations where there are high vaccination uptakes such the UK, the US, many other European countries and so on. But there are countries with low uptakes in Africa mostly. It also makes me want to sigh when I hear of some people say ''look, we have to learn to live with this virus.'' I seem to feel like hard to live your life while something deadly is roaming around there, its almost like in the aftermath of Chernobyl, they would say ''We have to learn to live with the radiation'' or during the Blitz in World War 2 they would say ''We have to learn to live with this bombs being dropped on us.''

Oops!
Yeah, there's a bigger one somewhere, but I didn't feel like spending time trying to find it.

They are. They don't protect you from the virus completely, as in if you have both shots, that doesn't mean you can't catch it, but having them lowers the chances of catching the virus, the chances of having a serious or long version of it and the chances of dying. I haven't followed the statistics of other countries too closely, but here in Finland, while the number of infections is growing, the number of people who need to be hospitalized for it, not to mention the number of people who need intensive care, is dropping. This is because the vaccine helps with preventing serious cases.

It freaks me out and doesn't help even more when some experts have said that a new variant could kill 1 in 3 people (even though it doesn't exist yet) and be as deadly as MERS with a fatality rate of 35%. I read there were outbreaks in 2012, 2015 and 2018 of MERS in South Korea and Saudi Arabia but I'm sure I found out somewhere that very deadly viruses like MERS and SARS with high fatality rates are unable to spread to so many people. I can't quite remember what the reason for it is though.