neuberger | But all this public panic, anger and shaming of the unvaccinated by the vaccinated — what the Sun-Times calls “the pandemic of the unvaccinated”, for example — hides another fact. The Covid vaccines, as good as they are, were not designed to prevent infection in the first place, only symptoms.
Let that sink in. The current Covid vaccines were not designed to prevent infection. That's a major reason why "breakthrough infections" occur. In addition, because the vaccines do prevent severe symptoms and a vast majority of cases, the number of breakthrough infections must, by definition, be under-counted.
When the virus is circulating in a vaccinated population, variants that are more rapidly transmitting are selected for --- those are vaccine evading variants.
— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) September 9, 2021
By vaccinating without shutting down transmission we are promoting vaccine evading variants.
This, from September 2020, was written by Dr. William Haseltine, formerly of the Harvard Medical School and a hero in the fight to genetically characterize AIDS (bio here and here):
Prevention of infection must be a critical endpoint. Any vaccine trial should include regularantien testing every three days to test contagiousness to pick up early signs of infection and PCR testing once a week to confirm infection by SARS-CoV-2 test the ability of the vaccines to stave off infection. Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Measuring differences amongst only those infected by SARS-CoV-2 underscores the implicit conclusion that the vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, only modify symptoms of those infected.
We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease[,] only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache. [emphasis added]
It may well be true that these vaccines, to some degree, do protect against infection, but (to use a club brandished against those who recommend studying ivermectin) no clinical studies, to my knowledge, have established that, or have established the degree of that protection.
It's certainly true that the world wanted these vaccines on the market on the fastest schedule possible. And it's also true that they have saved a great many lives. Just look at the ratio of infections-to-deaths prior to the vaccine rollout, and the same ratio afterward (chart above).
But it is also true that it's not just the unvaccinated who are infecting the vaccinated, since both vaccinated and unvaccinated can be Covid carriers and spreaders.
Which means that, even if the world were 100% vaccinated with these vaccines, the vaccinated who host the virus would provide ample breeding ground for variants.
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