Originally Posted by
rickair7777
Obviously delta came about in 2021, and was more transmissible... so even if the vaccines provided equal against new variants, more transmissible means more cases => more deaths. We can speculate what 2021 would have looked like without any vaccines.
Also in 2020 the at-risk population (including my octogenarian parents) was mostly hiding under their beds... that was of course not sustainable.
And yes I agree fatality counts are grossly over-stated, probably by at least a factor of two, but even if only 20% of recorded covid deaths are legit that's still far worse than the flu. Apparently that's too much for our society to accept. I advocated all along that we should just let it run its' course, and let people make their own choices about social distancing but obviously politicians and many voters had other ideas.
The Johns Hopkins study shows lockdowns only reduced death by 0.2%. Yes I agree delta was more transmissible but even with the original variant the vaccines were designed after, the vaccines lost any significant effectiveness after just 3 months. No effectiveness after 6 and in some age groups negative effectiveness after 7. The vaccines barely worked for delta and the first two doses did nothing whatsoever for omicron per Pfizer’s CEO. Even with the original variant the data shows after 3 months you were susceptible again, and those numbers get worse with each variant after.
if the vaccines were effective in any significant way and 85-90% of the vulnerable population is vaccinated then we would have to assume that the number of deaths could have easily exceeded 1-2 million in just 2021. Maybe that’s possible. We’ll never know, but that seems to be a stretch to me.