>>13994650He's referring to the SIR model of epidemiology.
S is susceptible to infection
I is infected
R is Removed (immune through vaccination, death, or natural immunity)
Each of those parameters is modeled in terms of how many persons an infected individual will infect. The numbers are extrapolated to predict what proportion of a population must be vaccinated to ensure the eradication of a virus.
Eradicating Covid with a vaccine was never going to happen. The only disease it ever worked for was smallpox and that's because smallpox infection kills people much more often and is much more conspicuous than Covid.
What vaccines are *actually* doing is creating selective pressure against more virulent strains of Covid (ie: alpha) and giving us less virulent strains (ie: omicron).
For instance, we knew that vaccines were less effective against Delta, and we knew that vaccinated people were hospitalized less than unvaccinated people. The media was saying that the vaccine "protects against Delta" but it could just be that Delta was less virulent and the people who were still being hospitalized were still being infected with Alpha.
