@rastinza "I didn't take the time to read the original article" ←enough said.

@pete I read the article you posted... I did get the idea of what the original article is concerned with and I understood it is not relevant with what you wrote.
In truth I don't believe you read the original article either, otherwise you wouldn't have written anything like that.

@rastinza I have read the original, which for reference is at: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198

It's pretty easy to see what the risk is: mRNA vaccines target a very specific part of the virus, making it plausible that evolution would render them less effective. Second, they're an injected vaccine, for a respiratory illnesses, making it plausible that they don't prevent transmission due to a lack of muscocal immunity.

@rastinza As to the issue with lockdown, it's not an identical issue. But it is related: lockdown favors virulence as a means to bypass transmission restrictions. The most worrying one being if virulence leads to people being hospitalized, and then spreading it in hospital. That's one of the theories as to why the Spanish Flu was so deadly to young people: wartime field hospitals.

@pete I never thought about that, and never heard anybody say anything like that but it does make sense.

However in most countries lockdown was imposed due to other restrictions, mainly the availability of beds in hospitals.
The main problem was avoiding filling all the hospitals and having ill people locked out.
There are surely other solutions to this problem, such as extensive testing of the population, but all of them have their disadvantages.

@rastinza "However in most countries lockdown was imposed due to other restrictions, mainly the availability of beds in hospitals."

_Predicted_ availability. Something you see over and over again is that hospitals actually weren't anywhere near as full as expected. Often, less full than usual even.

It's normal for hospitals to be full during flu seasons - heck, it's normal for hospitals to be almost full all the time, because hospitals are very expensive and we don't build much capacity.

@pete I do not know which countries you are talking about. I know the situation of my country only and therefore I use that as example.
In Italy in November in certain regions critical care beds needed were over 200% the available amount and normal beds over 100% the available amount.
If you do not cure people with severe symptoms they die, I wouldn't say it's a made up need.

@rastinza Look at the UK, Canada, California, etc.

There's certainly places with unusually overloaded hospitals. But its not a phenomenon everywhere. And part of it is probably due to poor treatment: early on we definitely overused ventilators for instance.

@pete That is indeed plausible.
We do not know if these vaccines prevent transmission, but they very well may not.
However the mRNA vaccines can also easily be adapted to new virus variations.
Moreover the focus is mostly on lowering the infectivity of the disease, not the lethality.

I do not think it is appropriate to apply the results of this study to this specific situation without adding proper considerations.

@rastinza "However the mRNA vaccines can also easily be adapted to new virus variations."

Unfortunately, we don't know that. The mRNA vaccines we have so far present a *much* higher rate of allergic reactions than other vaccines, and the reactions are significantly worse on the second dose. This is likely due to antigens getting created against the RNA carrier, a problem that was expected.

We don't know yet if we can safely give people these vaccines over and over again.

@pete I do realize you are better informed than I am, and I am thankful for the time you took explaining me everything.

I am sorry if I have been rude.