“My friend is double jabbed and currently has Covid.”
That’s what most people who are anti vaccine say as their selling points for not being vaccinated. The first bandwagon people jump on, “the vaccine doesn’t work”.
The point of the vaccines is to prevent serious illness/hospitalisation. People are constantly missing the point, and this is so frustrating. Its efficacy is different regarding different aspects. Vaccines have the following levels of efficacy:
Death – ~90%
Severe illness – ~80%
Symptomatic infection – ~65%
These values change across variants, but it was never expected to have 100% protection on all aspects. Also, people comparing vaccines and other viruses not requiring multiple jabs, don’t understand the major differences between viruses.
Vaccines offer protection against infection approx. 65% — There’s plenty of data on this. The vaccines are not driving variation, a large number of variants including alpha, beta, gamma, delta and lambda, were discovered in 2020 before vaccines were available. Omicron likely emerged in a neighboring country of South Africa where vaccination rates are low.
What people should know is that the vaccines are highly effective – again, there’s massive amounts of data on this. The mRNA vaccines have proven to be the most effective as boosters, though I have promised myself not to take anymore. Covid vaccines went through rigorous trials that absolutely did involve animal trials too. They adhered to all ethics and safety guidelines and had huge amounts of volunteers. They were also initially approved for emergency use authorisation but now fully approved by the FDA.
There are different restrictions in place in different countries but here in the UK, life is back to normal. We don’t have vaccine passports here unlike other countries. Restrictions on our daily lives, like wearing masks on public transport or enclosed places, is miserable but they are significantly different to last year. The fear mongering of lockdown here in the UK is coming from the antivaxxers who have seemed to place themselves in lockdown already in their heads. They were protesting lockdowns in the summer as they walked past pubs full of people. The countries going into heavy restrictions and lockdowns are places with low vaccine coverage like Austria.
The global spread of COVID-19 gives it plenty of opportunity to acquire advantageous mutations and new variants will arise due to this. Because of vaccines we are in a much stronger position to prevent severe disease and death.
I think Covid is here to stay & we just have to learn to live with it, if anyone wants any quality of life at all. That’s why I’m glad even Uganda is finally opening schools and getting rid of the curfew. People just have to continue wearing masks and sanitise a bit more. Lockdowns should be history anywhere in the world.
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