
First off, let me stress that I’m vaccinated myself, and that I support vaccination as a vital component of COVID response in the US.
That being said, US COVID policies—which at this point are centered on vaccination—have not been very successful to say the very least. We do, after all, rank #1 in deaths and are mishandling the current wave as if nothing could be learned from the previous ones. Our failure threatens the health of people not only here but around the world given the global scope of the pandemic. Other countries have employed much better methods, but we have so far failed to put them in practice them here. Adding insult to injury, much of the establishment political class and its partnered media is laying blame on a section of the population, rather than on the system where it belongs.
It’s a fact that—currently, anyway—being vaccinated greatly reduces your chance of dying or suffering serious illness from COVID. It’s also a fact that you can still pick it up and give it to other people, though—again, so far—at a lesser rate. So, in and of itself—that is, in the absence of other measures—vaccination does not stop the pandemic. It has the undeniable social benefit of reducing the number of hospitalizations, which reserves finite medical resources for other people, including those who are not vaccinated for whatever reason (more about that later). But vaccination by itself is insufficient.
This aspect of COVID vaccination—that it does not halt the spread—has been known from the beginning but was never adequately emphasized. Instead people had the impression that if they got their jabs, they were “safe.” They didn’t get this impression out of nowhere; they were given it by the US mainstream media, an institution that reflects the values of the ruling class, who prioritize economic considerations over people’s well-being.