For something that doesn't really hospitalize most people and the vaccine isn't 95%+ effective? I'd say it's a great success given how popular it actually is
Let's change tack slightly. Say that we had a vaccine for a deadly disease and 1 million people were vaccinated with it. And let's say that out of that 1 million people, 1000 died as a side effect of the vaccine, while 2001 people avoided certain death (and let's say that we are in a position to know that with absolute certainty).
Do you think such a vaccine would be considered successful?
I guess I should clarify that when I say "considered successful" I mean: a) by the general population and b) by the medical profession.
The COVID vaccine reduced severity of COVID and greatly reduced mortality. It also reduced spread albeit to a lesser degree (moreso with earlier strains). I would call that a success and it likely saved millions of lives so far.
Depends on what you think success is. Higher hospitalisation and case rates across the board with countries reintroducing restrictions doesn't sound like a success to me. And no, you can't just blame the unvaccinated when transmission is occuring readily through the vaccinated and hitting the hospitals, even if the individual outcomes are less severe.
That's a rather vague question. I don't pretend to be an expert, but i do consider the vaccine rollout and management to be a success in the country i live in and have followed most closely - France. The global vaccine rollout is decent, but severely lacking in many poorer countries that should be helped.
No, but the chance of breakthrough infection with the current vaccines is high enough that it's unlikely to allow good herd immunity at realistic vaccination rates, which sucks.
Immunity is always the goal if you can get it. It's not how you judge success though, you're right.
Thankfully the vaccines do drastically reduce severe illnesses though, so that's something.
They have reduced but sufficient effectiveness against the mutations that are in the news.
I guess there's lots of room for arguing about definitions, but I think we don't go back to zero if there is a vaccine escape. The production capacity that has been built in the last year is a big step forward (and we can expand it), and we are building out the administrative capacity to get the vaccine in people's arms (capacity that won't just vanish).
I don't see how anywhere could get to count as a "success story with vaccination" under your criteria while also not having "significant numbers of deaths with covid" and so I don't think you end up with a meaningful observation.
New Zealand had zero community cases without vaccination, during 2021 its vaccination programme has only covered some front line workers and very high risk people, and it still has zero community cases. Is that "success"? Is it "not success" ? How would you tell?
Whereas in my own country about two thirds of adults have had at least one jab, but still people are dying every single day from COVID-19, just much fewer than an the height of the pandemic here. Is that a success? Not a success?
One of the reasons New Zealand was so slow? With zero cases they had no reason to do Emergency Authorization. So they didn't. The Pfizer vaccine they picked got the full (albeit accelerated) approval process that any other medicine would get. This behaviour would be crazy in a country like the US with thousands dying, but it made sense in a country where most citizens have negligible risk day-to-day.
Of 514 patients in Israel hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Aug. 15, 59 percent were fully vaccinated, according to an Aug. 16 article from Science that cited national data tracked by Israel's largest health management organization
this is in a country that had < 60% vaccinated at the time.
personally I think the vaccines are worthwhile for some people, but I wouldn't call them an unqualified success either. Most people are going to uncritically quote the factoids that they like and do mental gymnastics around the factoids they don't like.
I think that what has your mind boggled is mostly your bias (respectfully). I'm not even saying you're wrong fwiw.
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