New study in Lancet shows vaccination makes no difference to transmission, thereby removing the main motive for mandatory vaccination. By Carlos Franco-Paredes, from the abstract of the paper.

This study showed that the impact of vaccination on community transmission of circulating variants of SARS-CoV-2 appeared to be not significantly different from the impact among unvaccinated people.

The scientific rationale for mandatory vaccination in the USA relies on the premise that vaccination prevents transmission to others, resulting in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. Yet, the demonstration of COVID-19 breakthrough infections among fully vaccinated health-care workers (HCW) in Israel, who in turn may transmit this infection to their patients, requires a reassessment of compulsory vaccination policies leading to the job dismissal of unvaccinated HCW in the USA. Indeed, there is growing evidence that peak viral titres in the upper airways of the lungs and culturable virus are similar in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

Thus, the current evidence suggests that current mandatory vaccination policies might need to be reconsidered, and that vaccination status should not replace mitigation practices such as mask wearing, physical distancing, and contact-tracing investigations, even within highly vaccinated populations.

The other rationale for vaccination mandatory was to not overload hospitals. But if we’d been allowed to use ivermectin then this wouldn’t be a problem either.

hat-tip Stephen Neil