early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
Who made such stupid claims and __why__? My own recollection, from Australia watching the US, was the the US political administration of the time turned any scientific based discussion into a complete shit show - many images of cowered CDC employees sucking their faces in while Trump v1.0 babbled on about bleach and sunlight.
From my first free of politics encounters with world class epidemiologists in 1980 or so I've not heard one claim that any vaccine had a 100% efficacy rate for both disease prevention and for eliminating spread - it has _always_ been a numbers game, like seat belts, of statistical reduction.
Your own link agrees:
Conclusions: A two-dose regimen of BNT162b2 conferred 95% protection against Covid-19 in persons 16 years of age or older.
95% protection is pretty good, but for all manner of reasons it's unusual to expect any vaccine to prevent 100% of all infections across millions of people or animals.
Typically, in educated countries, phrases such as "prevent infection and spread*" are understood to mean that in the same manner as "seat belts prevent death and injury*"
Okay got it, I didn't expect that was what you were taking issue with. At least in the US, we were constantly being told by our government leadership that we all needed to take the vaccine to stop the spread.
Fauci, for example, claimed very early on that we needed herd immunity and would get thee with around a 60% vaccination rate. He both knew that number was too low for the hypothesis of herd immunity, raising it as time went on, and that herd immunity requires a treatment to prevent transmission, implying the vaccines were known to do that (they weren't).
More egregiously there was a political push, picked up by the media as well, that basically boiled down to an argument that anyone refusing the vaccine is actively killing old people and children. They would go so far as to say unvaccinated people shouldn't be allowed into hospitals for care for unrelated health conditions.
All that to say, my point was simply that this review paper seems to be making claims that would require research I never saw happen. Sadly the pay wall means I can't read their full claims, but even the overview of their results seem dubious.
> They would go so far as to say unvaccinated people shouldn't be allowed into hospitals for care for unrelated health conditions.
Do you believe that someone with unmanaged ebola or measles should be allowed to go into a hospital for a broken toe?
Obviously there are possible pathogens for which this is a totally sensible position, and under uncertainty and strained resources the bar to get there gets much much lower.
You're raising drastically different scenarios in what I'm pretty sure would be a strawman argument, though yes people with Ebola do still get medical treatment. They are generally isolated and/or treated at a temporary unit setup during an Ebola outbreak, they aren't told no at the door because they're sick.
At the time people were talking about restricting COVID visitors, we really didn't know if we were dealing with something most similar to a seasonal cold, a serious flu, or the Spanish flu.
> They are generally isolated and/or treated at a temporary unit setup during an Ebola outbreak, they aren't told no at the door because they're sick.
Obviously this would be the result of not allowing unvaccinated people into hospitals. It is literally illegal in this country for us to simply "tell them no at the door."
People weren't calling for temporary hospitals being stood up or wings allocated just for unvaccinated people, they were calling for people to be denied care.
Your Ebola example still doesn't hold, the death rate and transmissibility is drastically different between the various colds/flus and Ebola. Not to mention you're justifying blocking individuals from care because we didn't know what we were worrying about yet and because they chose not to take an experimental vaccine using a new technology that was rushed through testing (and reasonably so, I get why they rushed to EUA but that does make it more effective or better understood).
I assume you don't agree with the ACA, medicare for all, or healthcare as a right. All of those ideas are based on ensuring everyone has access to healthcare, and that preexisting conditions can't be considered.
As we all know, when people on the Internet are calling for things, a reasonable expectation is for them to fully specify the end-to-end implementation plan. And if they don't provide, then you can definitely just presume the absolute worst case scenario!
