Things may be feeling more normal in the community, but the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, especially in the Sunshine State. Florida leads the nation for new daily cases of COVID-19 and Bay Area hospitals say the patients landing in their beds tend to be younger and unvaccinated.
“We are still averaging around 1,500 cases a day, and that’s pretty much flattened out over the last week or so, which is the highest level in the country right now,” said University of South Florida College of Public Health Distinguished Professor Dr. Thomas Unnasch. “People who haven’t been vaccinated are the ones that are getting still getting sick and getting hospitalized, and in many cases, dying from the infection.”
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Can you give a citation? All the studies I’ve seen indicate that in fact some of the vaccines do prevent infection in most cases; see the many links posted by others on this thread.
Unless all you are saying is what we usually mean by “prevent infection” is really “permits the immune system to almost immediately fight off the invading virus”, and therefore doesn’t really keep out the initial infection, in which case the objection is semantic and a deflection.
None of the Covid vaccines are 100% effective, nor do they necessarily protect
against mutations, other illnesses, or Qanon-friendly misinformation.
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Effective immunisation is what the vaccines can provide but not sterilising immunity
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This. Very few vaccines confer true, sterilizing immunity, and even those that do in theory, have had cases of breakthrough, like measles. Too much variability in human immune response. Other than allowing rightwing media idiots to twist the term into something that threatens fertility, sterilizing immunity is not a thing that we need here. Vaccine uptake is.
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The poor little viruses would not be able to have babies! 
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I heard the vaccines were tested on live virus fetuses!
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In other words, even if they prevent you from being infected, it might not prevent you from passing the disease on. (This article of doesn’t take a stand on whether that is what is happening with this Covid vaccine.) Still, they mainly prevent you from being infected, which is all the assertion was.
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These freaking fools
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The point isn’t coming up over on these islands yet, because the vaccines are not yet approved for under 18s. However, there is already a framework that can deal with this issue of consent:
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Your definition of infected seems to be “get sick”.
Is that correct?
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To some extent, that’s correct. Do we count it as an infection if one virus particle infiltrates one endothelial cell, builds its copies but then gets shut down by the immune system? No, that’s not an infection. So what’s the threshold? Frankly, the threshold is either symptomatic infection or a positive test result, as arbitrary as that ends up being. That’s all we have.
Same thing with being contagious. Hypothetically, that same patient who has one cell that gets infected can shed one virus particle and - hypothetically again - infect someone else. But that’s not a real-world scenario. Depending upon the person and the extent of exposure, it takes hundreds of thousands to millions of virus particles shed by one person to infect another. So a lot of people who, if you look at it on a particle-by-particle basis, are “contagious” actually aren’t. There is no reasonable way they are going to infect someone else because they simply aren’t shedding enough viral particles. So here again we have a very tenuous definition.
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From PostSecret today:
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Essentially, though that is reductionist and doesn’t include asymptomatic and latent infection. I don’t expect my vaccine to buy me dinner and co-parent my children, I want it to train my immune system to block the virus from compromising my system.
See also the usage here:
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This is not over yet. Not by a longshot.
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