https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-11-03/are-the-unvaccinated-still-a-danger-to-the-rest-of-us-covidQuote:
For almost two years, COVID-19 vaccine holdouts have been the objects of earnest pleading and financial inducements, of social-media shaming and truth campaigns. They've missed weddings, birthday celebrations and recitals, and even forfeited high-stakes athletic competitions. Until last month, they were barred from entering the United States and more than 100 other countries.
Now the unvaccinated are suddenly back in the mix. They're dining in restaurants, rocking out at music festivals and filling the stands at sporting venues. They mingle freely in places where they used to be shunned for fear they'd seed superspreader events.
It's as if they're no longer hazardous to the rest of us. Or are they?
"Clearly, the unvaccinated are a threat to themselves," said Dr. Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University. As recently as August, their risk of dying of COVID-19 was six times higher than for people who were fully vaccinated and eight times higher than for people who were vaccinated and boosted, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But, Shaman acknowledged, "the danger to the rest of us is a more debatable issue."
When public officials imposed vaccine mandates, the unvaccinated certainly appeared to pose demonstrable dangers to their communities.
State and local leaders sought not only to suppress spread of the virus, but also to prevent their healthcare systems from being overwhelmed, degrading care for all. The unvaccinated made those goals harder to achieve since they were more likely to become infected and, when they did, to require hospitalization.
U.S. officials had long hoped to vaccinate the American public into a state of "herd immunity," in which so few people would be vulnerable to the virus that the outbreak would simply sputter out. That objective assumed a uniformly high uptake of vaccine across the nation. It also assumed a vaccine that protected against reinfection, and did so durably.
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The country's mainstay vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna do not construct a force field around recipients that shields them from ever becoming infected with the coronavirus. Nor do they prevent a person with a breakthrough infection from spreading the virus to others.
However, the vaccines appear to reduce the amount of virus a sick person sheds by coughing, sneezing or simply talking. That means unvaccinated people are not only more likely to be infected, but also somewhat more likely to spread it to others.
It would be hard to assert that if everyone were vaccinated, the coronavirus would just go to ground. This pathogen has proved adept at finding ways around our vaccine protection and is likely to remain a presence among us for generations to come, like influenza and HIV.
But the unvaccinated and undervaccinated are almost certainly playing an outsized role in the coronavirus' continued success, experts say. Exactly how much is hard to pinpoint. Scientists can quantify transmission differences between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated in the lab. Applying those differences to the real world is much trickier, especially in a population as immunologically diverse as Americans now are.
Finally, there's concern that unvaccinated and undervaccinated Americans could accelerate the emergence of new coronavirus variants, some of which are bound to be even more transmissible or more adept at evading existing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies. Either or both would cause new waves of transmission and illness.
While it's a theoretical possibility, the unvaccinated are not prolific incubators of genetic variants. People with immune system deficiencies are much more likely to develop the long-running bouts of COVID-19 that can spawn new variants with concerning mutations, and most of them are vaccinated.
COVID-19 surges promote the emergence of variants. By virtue of the sheer number of people infected, a surge increases the number of times the virus replicates and offers it more chances to mutate. If it drives hospitalizations, it will ensnare patients being treated for immune-compromising conditions such as HIV, cancer and organ transplants.
And as the unvaccinated are joined by ever-larger numbers of people who are undervaccinated, surges become a more plausible prospect.
People routinely confuse their communities' state of immunity with their own vulnerability, said Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children's Hospital and dean of Baylor College of Medicine's National School of Tropical Medicine. When fewer of their neighbors are getting sick and dying, and high vaccination rates have suppressed COVID-19, even the unvaccinated feel invulnerable.
"That could be a lethal mistake," he warned.
Of course we are, but not because of the virus. We are because we refused to bend the knee to the tyrants, Coronakarens, Branch Covidians, and the rest who would have loved to put us into camps or even killed us outright.
