Surprising how many people downvote blindly without even making an attempt to argue against the data and conclusions of those studies. It's like an anti-critical-thinking cult.
That first link doesn't really back up "zero effect on reducing the spread of covid". It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.
Their analysis is incredibly shallow, for example comparing Portugal or Iceland (high vaccination rate, mostly open, lots of COVID cases) to Vietnam (low vaccination rate, completely locked down at the time the analysis was done, not many COVID cases). You can't make any inference about the vaccine / caseload relationship when you ignore the fact that one country is completely open and the other had such a strict lockdown that people were struggling to get food.
>It's a non-peer-reviewed discussion of some graphs from Our World In Data.
A discussion published in the European Journal of Epidemiology. It doesn't just look at those two countries; its statistical analysis covers 68 countries and 2947 US counties. You don't think that if the vaccine were effective at preventing spread, there should be at least some evidence of this effect when comparing vaccination rate and spread across different regions?
The discussion completely ignores basically all the potential confounding factors. Two huge ones are lockdown measures and level of testing.
Even in a largely vaccinated population, if you do widespread community testing you will find a lot of asymptomatic cases. If you don't do widespread community testing you won't. So you can have wildly different caseloads in two highly-vaccinated populations, yet no meaningful medical difference in the outcomes (since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death).
Could you please provide a peer reviewed study that takes into account all potentially confounding factors that shows the claim you made in the last sentence related to prevention against deaths?
When I look at the pfizer 6 month study (not peer reviewed) I do not see that.
Every dataset I look says the opposite so I would love to see the peer reviewed study that takes into account all potential confounding factors that led you to your conclusion.
> since, as we know, vaccination is an effective prevention against serious illness and death
Could you please share a meaningful study that comes to this conclusion and does not ignore all potential confounding factors? (I don't mean it in a confrontational way; I'm genuinely curious since I only managed to find heavily confounded data)
Even ignoring all confounding factors it should still be possible to detect an effect via regression. It's like if you try to price S&P off just one of its constituent stocks; you're still going to observe some correlation even when only looking at a single large constituent.
