> That vaccine granted immunity was a big one, it rapidly became less symptoms, and from that surreptitiously changed again to well you'll still have a week of feeling like shit, but you'll be less likely to die from it.
You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.
Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.
This is the same thing as "less symptoms".
"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.
All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.
So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.
If vaccines don’t provide immunity then what’s the point of all the public policy such as vaccine passports, etc? If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.
> If you can still catch and spread it those who are vaccinated should be subject to the same testing requirements as the unvaccinated.
You're misunderstanding the precise use of the word "can" here. I can win the lottery. I can win a coin toss. But the odds are drastically different, and so en masse, we should plan and test much more for the "much more likely" case than the other. Now, vaccination against COVID gives better odds of not catching and not spreading COVID. You still _can_, though.
> If vaccines don’t provide immunity
But they do, statistically they provide a high level of immunity. Not 100% though. You know this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699699
So why are you contradicting yourself?
It's not a binary thing... Vaccines make it significantly less likely that you will be infected, or if you are infected that you will develop the viral load necessary to be infectious, or if you are infectious, the period of time you are infectious for will be much shorter. At each step along the way the vaccine makes less likely that the vaccinated individual will infect someone else.
It makes it sufficiently less likely that if everyone was vaccinated, each infected person would, on average, go on to infect less than one other person, and the pandemic would end. The more people who are vaccinate, the lower that average of "people that get infected by each infectious person" goes. That is why vaccinations are important to everyone, not just the individual who is vaccinated.
It's unlikely the virus would have died out in any circumstance, given how infectious it is and easy to transmit.
We're probably going to get progressively less deadly variants until the end of times.
Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
Talking about the increased risk of blood clots, saying that you would still get symptoms, that you would still infect other people, that you would still have to wear a mask, that you would still have to do a test whenever you travel, that vaccines would lose efficacy and need a booster every 6 month - that's the kind of stuff that would get you branded as an no-vax and banned from youtube.
> Vaccines' downsides were definitely overplayed because they were trying to push vaccines.
We paused the use of the J&J vaccine over the blood clot issue that turned out to be a common side effect of many drugs and it was at a rate lower than common birth control pills.
No one has downplayed the side effects or done something nefarious is some nebulous attempt to exert power and disinformation over people.
You're being downvoted but the medical industry in the US honestly has terrible PR. It's not surprising that people misunderstand.
Vaccines do grant immunity, but immunity doesn't mean "you cannot catch the virus" and it never has. It means that your immune system will recognise the virus immediately and fight it.
This is the same thing as "less symptoms".
"A week of feeling like shit" has nothing to do with the virus at all, they're not symptoms of an infection that you are feeling, they are side effects of your immune system learning to fight the virus that the vaccine is teaching it about.
All, or at least most, vaccines require occasional boosters, but if everyone is vaccinated when they should be, the virus will die out before any significant number of further infections can occur, as has now happened with Polio and Smallpox.
So in short: You were not lied to, but you absolutely should have had this explained to you with greater clarity.