With Delta:
2 doses are good at preventing infection
2 doses are very very good at preventing severe illness and death
3 doses are very very good preventing infection
3 doses are extremely good indeed at preventing severe illness and death.
With Omicron:
2 doses are insufficient at preventing infection (but do offer some protection)
2 doses are good at preventing severe illness and death
3 doses are very good at preventing infection
3 doses are extremely good indeed at preventing severe illness and death.
Omicron has changed the goalposts. The two doses that constituted full vaccination against Delta do not offer the same protection against Omicron. Furthermore, the booster dose was already being recommended for those double-vaccinated, as the effectiveness of the vaccines was shown to be waning until at 6 months people would need that booster shot in order to get their immune response back up to around that high level of protection. That's against Delta.
When Omicron entered the picture, the two doses were no longer sufficient. The effectiveness of the two doses against Omicron lowered to the point that at 3 months, a third dose was not only being recommended... it was actually being considered as part of the definition of "full vaccination". Health responses and treatments and vaccinations don't remain static in a swiftly moving environment.
You could say "Ah, so the vaccinated can pass on the virus, so what's the point in forcing anyone to be vaccinated and making it a requirement of entry or anything of that nature?" The point is that the unvaccinated are far more likely to become infected or to infect others. They are the highest risk group for contracting the virus, and for infecting others.
The point is also that, as evidence came in about the waning effectiveness against infection (Omicron variant) over time of two vaccination doses, public health response changed to the new data. The third dose brings up the level of protection against INFECTION to roughly the same level as the vaccination (two doses) had against the original strain of COVID-19. That is, highly effective in preventing infection.
And perhaps the most important point... The people at highest risk of requiring hospitalisation with COVID-19, and of requiring ICU, and of dying, are these:
unvaccinated people (even if they've previously been infected with COVID-19)
partially vaccinated people whose immune response has not yet kicked into maximum (hasn't been long enough since their second dose, or they haven't had their second dose yet)
immunocompromised people
pregnant women
people with certain medical conditions.
The unvaccinated are disproportionately represented in the numbers being hospitalised, but even more so in the numbers requiring ICU and with those who are so severely ill that they require ventilation.
Also, please bear in mind that COVID-19 is a very infectious disease. It has been noted as very infectious right from the start, which is why it has spread all over the globe and caused a pandemic. With so many being infected, even a relatively small percentage of deaths will be quite a large number.
Omicron is considerably more infectious still. It seems quite likely that Omicron is milder than Delta, but that does not make it a mild disease. Omicron is wildly, insanely infectious, and its mutations make it adept at evading immune response and reinfecting, so even where populations have high levels of vaccination, Omicron overwhelms the community (particularly since, with those high levels of vaccination, many social distancing and mask-wearing requirements were ditched).
That does not mean that vaccinations serve no purpose (or very little purpose). It does mean that a third dose is indicated at about 3 months after your last (second) dose. But that's to get numbers of infections down. We can see how effective the vaccines are by the low numbers of hospitalisations and patients in ICU, and the low (although heartbreaking) numbers of deaths.
Had we gone for the unvaccinated route, we'd be in so much more pain...
I look at study data, raw data, not political yap-yap-yap. I'm hugely unimpressed with Australia's current COVID-19 response... We were doing so well, and then ... bang... they let go.
