alt Hacker News> Have infectious diseases stopped spreading?
Thanks to vaccines? Yes. Multiple times in history.
Smallpox, polio, measles, mumps.
> vaccines famously had no significant impact on the rate of the spread.
That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.
As far as I remember, vaccines were the main reason things became safe enough to things to return to a sense of normalcy.
I mean, I am not from they US, so my actual response to this news is a vague shrug. I just hope the anti-vax bullshit is contained within US borders.
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> That's quite a claim. I see you provided no sources.
Why do I need to source anything? Nobody credible ever claimed the vaccines would slow the spread, no evidence was ever provided that vaccines slow the spread and theory suggests they probably won't slow the spread. The people making things up in defiance of the obvious are the ones who need to start providing sources on this one.
If you want to check the numbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Australia - we've got 22 million vaccinated people on a population of around 25 million in 2021. We see ~12 million confirmed COVID cases and in the immediate post-lockdown period the testing system crumbled under load. Do the math. An exponential process that everyone was exposed to was downgraded to ... still an exponentially growing process that everyone was exposed to. Maybe it spread the pandemic phase out to 2 months instead of 1 (based on my memory of watching the stats at the time).
The vaccine didn't cut down on the number of infections. It was strictly personal protection. Members of my family regularly get COVID.
Measles charts (US) [1] Line goes down to nearly zero and stays there.
Polio chart (US) [2] See the line go almost straight down to 0 after vaccine introduction and stay there.
Smallpox has been totally exterminated by vaccination.
Any questions?
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/measles-cases-and-death
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prevalence-of-polio-rates...