About a month after I became eligible for my shot, a paper came out of Israel indicating that vaccine effectiveness against infection dropped to 50 or 60% after 6 months. And on top of that we saw evidence that vaccinated people carry equal viral loads and spread the disease as much (though for a shorter duration) as unvaccinated people.
I concluded that there was a benefit to being vaccinated to protect those around me, but that it might be short-lived—or require boosting—to stay above a compelling threshold. And also that I could likely do just as much to protect those around me by continuing to only see people outside, wear a mask, etc.
The other thing that became clear during this time was that Covid would become endemic. That is—we would not be able to stop its spread, and would have to learn to live with it in our lives. This meant that most of the measures we were taking weren’t stopping people from getting the disease, they were just delaying it. If getting vaccinated meant I could prevent a Covid illness, that was pretty compelling. But if it only meant pushing the illness back a few months, that was a bit less remarkable. Still beneficial—by spreading the strain on health systems or allowing more time for new treatments to come out—just not nearly as much.
Read the rest here.
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