To enjoy an interesting and arguably also somewhat more accurate experience reading articles such as these, try mentally replacing the term "vaccine breakthrough" with "vaccine failure". Going to hospital is not protection.
The vaccine does two things; it reduces the chance of getting covid (not terribly effectively, for Omicron), and it reduces the average severity of cases (very effectively). "Breakthrough" is where it fails on the first point; failure would imply failing in _both_ cases. So you could possibly call the hospitalised cases failure (though even then, hospitalised vaccinated cases are on average less severe and less likely to die than hospitalised unvaccinated, so it's a stretch), but it would be very misleading to call the first case failure.
This depends on which definition of the vaccine you've chosen to adopt. As the product has not changed, only the manufacturers claims about it, the original definition is the most applicable in terms of its success or failure.
What's misleading is to pretend that a product, sold as a "vaccine", sold as originally possessing many of the commonly-understood qualifiers of the use of that term, turns out in reality to possess none of them.
It does not vaccinate against the disease. It does not vaccinate against being infected, harmed or killed by the disease. It is for all intents and purposes, not a "vaccine" by any prior widely-accepted definition.
These "vaccines" limited effects at reducing symptoms (the only remaining claim of late), do not even persist more than a week or two before beginning to wane to nothing. These are at best therapeutic drugs, not vaccines.
That is, they are - broadly - failures. Quibbling about ever narrower definitions of what constitutes the failure bears little useful relevance to the unfortunate reality, instead only seeming to facilitate manufacturer public relations.
> It does not vaccinate against the disease. It does not vaccinate against being infected, harmed or killed by the disease
It reduces the chances of all three, and _dramatically_ reduces the chances of the last two. That's what vaccines do. Now, it's not a _great_ vaccine. There are a couple of magic bullet near-100% effective vaccines (for instance, only 3% of people with the MMR vaccine exposed to Measles will get Measles, and the smallpox vaccine is 95% effective), and there are some... less effective ones (assuming the right strain is targeted the flu vaccine is 40-60% effective at preventing infection, and reduces chances of death somewhat).
Hopefully better vaccines will become available, but for now we are where we are.
I mean, if you want to say "only things with >90% efficacy at preventing infection are vaccines"... okay, but what do you want to call all the vaccines that that excludes?
> These "vaccines" limited effects at reducing symptoms (the only remaining claim of late), do not even persist more than a week or two before beginning to wane to nothing
Eh? Where are you getting that? It does look like efficacy vs _infection_ diminishes rapidly (at least for two doses; insufficient evidence to say anything with great certainty about three doses so far), but a two-dose course from last year remains quite effective at preventing severe outcomes (though less effective than three doses).
> These are at best therapeutic drugs, not vaccines.
They're not therapeutic drugs at all; if you give the vaccine to someone who _currently has covid_ it won't help them (at least for that particular case of covid).
> That is, they are - broadly - failures.
In Ireland, we have about 95% adult vaccination. Most of our current ICU cases are unvaccinated under-65s; there are almost no vaccinated under-65s, and a small number of vaccinated over-65s (essentially all over-65s are vaccinated). I would not call this a _failure_, at all. If the ICU rate was the same in the general population as in the unvaccinated population, ICU capacity would be exhausted and people would die needlessly. Preventing that is a success.
Even the CEO of Pfizer recently stated 1 or 2 shots "offer very limited protection, if any" (my emphasis), whilst saying the booster offers good protection. But the booster is the same substance... the formulation hasn't changed. He's literally saying 1 shot of it does nothing, 2 shots of it does nothing, but 3 shots of it is magically great. (And I still remember a time when "fully vaccinated" meant you were done at two, and anyone saying there'd be more was a conspiracy theorist.)
Meanwhile in Queensland which had suffered 29 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, the health minister just announced that 7 more people died overnight, and they were all vaccinated - but not "boosted". Ie, two shots of, as the Pfizer CEO put it, a vaccine of "limited effectiveness, if any". So there we have it, two shots and not three and you're dead, apparently. Who's clogging up the ICU's there?
And have a look out of the proverbial window. Almost everywhere there's more cases, more hospitalisations and more deaths. That is, if the vaccines worked: they'd work.
But they haven't, and don't. In many places we're in a worse position than before we had them.
That is, they're failures.
Meanwhile things that do actually work, and even have their mechanisms of action completely understood underlying why they work, are sidelined, suppressed or even banned.
If indeed in Ireland you have "95% vaccination", why do you have any cases, hospitalisations or deaths? If it doesn't work at 95% take-up, when does it work? How can the R-value even do anything remotely ICU-clogging with a single digit percentage? On the surface, it doesn't add up.
But a little deeper, and it maybe begins to... because when you're counting "vaccinated" people, be sure not to mix up who is "vaccinated" and who isn't, according to the latest shift in the goal posts. In some places for example, if you have been "fully vaccinated" but not had a third shot, you're considered "unvaccinated" again, and will die in that category. Further, were you "fully vaccinated", by whatever definition, but have only been so for 14 days, and die, in some places indeed you'll also die considered "unvaccinated".
Or to put it another way, how many of the people dying and clogging ICU's never had any shot at all, and how many did?
So if someone was permanently disabled it's a success? What about in hospital 8 weeks but eventually recovered? It's hard to understand why this needs to be debated. Why is it so bad to simply admit it failed to protect?
Even if we set the bar at death I guarantee someone would step up and say: "Yes, but they would've died even sooner without the vaccine! Oh come ye let us praise it". The religious fervour is bizarre. Let's face it - the vaccines are a bit shit.
It creates a more neutral impression of the vaccines efficacy. The use of the term "breakthrough case" seems entirely geared toward downplaying ineffectiveness. Why not simply call it failure when the vaccine fails?
