The COVID-19 pandemic

[danbrotherston]

This is the second time you've made this unsubstantiated and broadly false claim. The vaccine is extremely effective, "getting COVID" is not created equal. If you are vaccinated you are orders of magnitude less likely to be infected, and if you are infected, you are orders of magnitude less likely to go to the hospital. I'd say something which achieves two orders of magnitude in both categories is "effective".  Even with things like the Delta variant these numbers hold.  We consider the flu vaccine to be effective, and it doesn't achieve numbers near the COVID vaccine.

But we've already explained this, why do you continue to repeat this?

Given that we have not even hit the lowest number you have mentioned (we are only at 67% fully vaccinated) and I've never heard 70%...the lowest I've ever heard was 75%, I don't really agree with the second paragraph either.

First, it's not a false claim. People are still getting sick, even if vaccinated. They are still being hospitalized, with the vaccine. They are still dying, with the vaccine. Yes, I get it they offer you protection compared to being unvaccinated, but it's not nearly effective enough.

They are not effective as they need them to be for us to move on. The flu vaccine itself is hardly effective (something like 50%). Effective vaccines are vaccines that are made for measles, polio, tetanus, etc. Diseases that have been wiped from the face of the earth, for the most part. But even if we had 100% vaccinated, this disease is still going to carry on, UNLESS, we get a better vaccine.

I'm not OK with being happy with what we got. I am not happy that we're going to need to be vaccinated with the same shot again and again, and again. PHAC doesn't seem to want to say that this is needed, but Israel and the USA have either gone ahead with this or are about it.

Perhaps do a little research first, Dan, before spewing BS. Here are a few good links to get a start:

https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data

https://www.politico.eu/article/biontech...ime-study/
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/s...ccine.html

https://www.statista.com/statistics/7864...in-canada/

https://www.canada.ca/en/public-health/s...ccine.html

https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/immuniz...index.html

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/dtap-td...index.html

Please, show you're research that our current vaccine is good enough for us to get over Covid, just like we got over the above diseases. I'll wait.

You didn't say 100% effective, and if you did, I'd point out that such a metric has never been applied to vaccines before. Even the smallpox vaccine which was used to eradicate a disease from the face of the earth was not much more effective than the COVID vaccine:

https://www.health.ny.gov/publications/7...vaccinated.

Certainly I think we have moved on from smallpox.

In fact, the COVID vaccine is effective enough for us to eradicate COVID if we wanted to, by achieving a sufficiently high vaccination rate with other measures.

And if you wish to talk about duration, the COVID vaccine has shown waning antibodies, as many vaccines do, because that's how our immune system works, antibodies are not always long lived. However the memory cells which form the long term portion of our immune system have been shown to be robust for the vaccine. It is less effective over time because with only memory cells remaining, it takes a little longer for the immune system to mount a response by producing new antibodies, but that only means that an infection is far less severe.

And given that 100% of the people hospitalized locally with COVID are not vaccinated, vaccination is absolutely effective at moving past COVID, if only the assholes would get fucking vaccinated.

In fact PHAC has explicitly stated there will probably be a yearly booster, given that it was big news that they ordered one.  But this is primarily needed because mutations (which result from the disease continuing to be widespread as a result of low vaccination rates) occurring, not because the vaccine is necessarily ineffective.

Perhaps it is you who needs to do some research.

What really confuses me about your response here, is that you think that a magically 100% effective vaccine would somehow solve COVID? Unless it vaccinates against stupidity and can be administered via horse dewormer it isn't going to do shit against the anti-vaccers who are driving this wave of COVID.