Vaccinations are most effective if we reach herd immunity, which requires others to get vaccinated. The safety is not “perceived”, it’s scientifically verified by tracking hospitalization and death rates as it’s been rolled out at a global scale. The reason herd immunity is so important is that those that are immunocompromised _cannot_ safely get a vaccination and thus rely on there being enough vaccinated individuals to reduce the chance of catching it. Further, by many choosing to remain unvaccinated and allowing the virus to continue evolving we greatly increase risk it mutates into something the current vaccine cannot prevent.
Unfortunately, with Delta variant transmission rate and vaccine breakthrough probability, and the fact that no vaccine yet has a sterilization effect, we will not reach herd immunity. This is a done deal. Let's work on alternative strategy.
Delta has won this particular battle but not the war.
The existing mRNA vaccines were pretty close to having a sterilizing effect (unexpected and very good surprise) on the previous variants.
There is still hope that the Delta-specific updates (Moderna is already testing theirs) will restore that level of efficacy, and there's also ongoing research on intranasal vaccines which should work even better for that.
It’s not that the vaccinated can’t still spread COVID, but they do so at a much lower rate which gives the virus less chance to mutate. Anything that reduces transmission helps curb the development of new variants and vaccinations are one important piece of achieving that. Here’s a resource by the WHO which describes this.
