[egg1]

Even if the polio vaccine isn't fully sterilizing, would you put our current COVID vaccines in the same league? Imagine we're living in the 60s right now, and we have a polio or smallpox vaccine with 70%+ uptake in the adult population, but the infection rate remains virtually unchanged. Would you consider this good enough?

I mean, take this quote from Dr. Fauci himself:

> As a physician and as a scientist and a public-health person, I think it is not entirely correct to make this very strong dichotomy between waning protection against hospitalization and death and waning immunity against infection and mild-to-moderate disease. It is an assumption that it’s okay to get infected and to get mild-to-moderate disease as long as you don’t wind up in the hospital and die. And I have to be open and honest: I reject that. I think we should be preventing people from getting sick from COVID even if they don’t wind up in the hospital.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/fauci-boo...

[_djo_]

It's a different type of virus. We have never, ever, successfully achieved the level of immunity against a rapidly mutating airborne virus as we have with SARS-CoV-2. Our greatest successes, Polio and Smallpox, were both extremely stable and without animal reservoirs, making vaccination much more straightforward.

You're demanding perfection and insisting that anything that falls short is worthless. That makes no sense.

[egg1]

I'm not saying the vaccines are worthless, I'm saying there is a trend of public figures gaslighting and making excuses for their ineffectiveness against Omicron, by redefining commonly accepted notions of what a vaccine is intended to do and pretending our goal all along was to merely prevent severe disease. The goal, as we've seen with past mass vaccination campaigns that worked, should be to stop the spread. Period. We need new vaccines, not fourth or fifth shots of the same thing.