> Much of the rhetorical analysis is based on the medical premise that getting vaccinated has no individual or contagion reduction efficacy. Politics aside, thi

> Much of the rhetorical analysis is based on the medical premise that getting vaccinated has no individual or contagion reduction efficacy. Politics aside, this was simply not true (though thanks to variants may be true today). We will never know now if specific variants could have been avoided if people got promptly vaccinated. Delta arose in India before widespread vaccination was even available there, and Omicron comes from a sublineage which even predates Delta. So we actually know the answer to the question of whether immune escape variant mutation could have been prevented had fewer people been unwilling to take COVID vaccines -- it could not have. (And all this is setting aside the fact that there is not actually a magical solution to the impossible logistical problem of getting a shot into every person on Earth all at once, to say nothing of animal reservoirs.) This should have been expected given that decades of research prior to Operation Warp Speed had failed to discover durable and effective sterilizing vaccines against coronaviruses. Even with the original strains which predominated at the time the vaccines were introduced it was never studied and not clear whether they could prevent transmission, and many public health authorities and the CEO of Pfizer said so at the time. And this was all quite clear long before the propaganda and scapegoating campaigns the article is criticizing kicked into gear. The CDC Provincetown study which showed the vaccinated were transmitting quite easily came out in late July. And today, a simple comparison of highly vaxxed jurisdictions to less vaxxed ones suggests that the shots are actually raising the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which may be why we've stopped hearing so much about the "vaxxed vs unvaxxed" outcomes and increasing numbers of public health authorities are removing the breakdowns from their reporting.