Look, I’m not a doctor or virologist, so I’m just going to talk some common sense here and if I’m wrong you can point it out in the comments. My understanding is that, because it’s airborne, the communicability of COVID-19 depends on how much virus an infected person is exhaling into the environment. Another way of putting it is that the more virus you inhale, the less likely your immune system is to successfully fight off infection.
A vaccine helps your immune system do a more efficient job, but it doesn’t prevent you from inhaling virus. Usually, but not always, the vaccine prevents the virus from getting a foothold in your body, and that means it you aren’t going to be exhaling a lot of virus that might infect someone else. So, in this sense, being vaccinated makes it significantly less likely that you’ll help spread the virus.
Wearing a mask limits how much virus you inhale, and it also limits how much virus you put into the environment around you, so on both scores it helps limit the spread. Social distancing is another way you can minimize the sharing of virus.
In any case, COVID-19 vaccinations do not prevent the spread of the coronavirus, but they do have an powerful impact. Some of this is semantics. Does “prevent” mean “lessen” or does it mean “preclude”? There are things you can do to prevent forest fires, but there is nothing you can do to eliminate forest fires.
If you listen to Christoper Tremoglie of the Washington Examiner, however, you might think you’ve been lied to. In his version of events, the vaccination was promised as a way to eliminate the virus. And, worse, the pharmaceutical providers of the vaccines did not even test to see if it was effective in eliminating the virus before making them available. As evidence for this, he goes to Europe.
For months, the Left in the United States told us to get the vaccine to prevent transmission of COVID. The vaccine was touted as efficient, effective, and a key to saving lives because it stopped the virus from spreading. But last week, while giving testimony to the European Parliament, Pfizer executive Janine Small admitted that Pfizer did not test to determine whether the vaccine would prevent the spread of COVID. This admission debunked essentially everything the Left told people about vaccination and showed the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” narrative was nothing but another Democratic lie.
“So, there are no misunderstandings: Was the Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” Rob Roos, a European member of Parliament from the Netherlands, asked. “If not, please say it clearly. If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee? And I really want a straight answer, yes or no, and I’m looking forward to it.”
“No,” Small said. “We really had to move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.”
Obviously, the vaccines were made available as soon as they were deemed reasonably safe, and I don’t think there’s any valid complaint about that. They immediately started saving lives by the hundreds of thousands. But they did not “stop” the virus from spreading (or mutating). In part this was because hundreds of millions of people didn’t get the vaccine either because they had some concern or objection, or because they couldn’t get their hands on them. In a perfect world where everyone was simultaneously inoculated with a perfectly up-to-date vaccine, it may have been possible to eradicate the virus entirely, but even that’s not certain since it’s transmits from animals to humans. That would have been our best chance, however.
So, is this justified?
Seemingly everything the Left promoted turned out to be misinformation. They criticized, shamed, and vilified those who resisted taking the vaccine. They mobilized people to believe a set of ideas that turned out not to be true.
The people who were so concerned with the importance of telling the truth from 2017-2020 had no problem promoting disinformation as long as it suited their political agenda. They (falsely) blamed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people during the pandemic on people who did nothing to cause them. The Left stood on a soapbox and proudly asserted its moral superiority over those against taking the vaccine. But, it turns out, they were nearly all wrong.
The “get vaccinated to save lives” and “trust the science” mantras that dominated pandemic messaging for nearly two years turned out to be a farce. The people promoting the importance of trusting science showed exactly why we should all be skeptical of it.
I won’t dispute there was some confusion about what was being promised, or what was realistic anyway. But vaccines prevent the spread of COVID-19 and therefore save lives. The more people that are vaccinated, the more effective the vaccines are, and this did not need to be demonstrated in a study prior to making the vaccines available because it’s common sense.