> If the R Naught is more than 1 then you don't get any benefit to vaccinating a population that isn't vulnerable.
Is that actually true, though? I'm vaccinated - am I not better off having that vaccine, being less likely to be hospitalized or die even if I get a breakthrough case?
Even if natural immunity via infection is better in every way (no idea if this is true, but suppose it is for the sake of this question), am I not better off having that occur while vaccinated and therefore less likely to die?
It seems as though natural immunity is great if it doesn't kill you. And even if the death rate is low, 1% of a large number is still a lot of dead people. We could reduce that number and just deal with the less severe breakthrough cases.
> If the R Naught is more than 1 then you don't get any benefit to vaccinating a population that isn't vulnerable.
That's not how R values work at all. Firstly, an R value of 1.5 and an R value of 5 have wildly different outcomes in terms of controlling spread, and vaccines that can reduce R values can reduce spread even if the R value remains above 1. More to the point, though, "transmission is happening in vaccinated people" doesn't imply that the R value is above 1, and it doesn't look like you've provided any evidence that that's the case, nor does the fact that infections sometimes occur, in and of itself, suggest it.
Only lockdowns brought it back down which creates other problems around immune health in the population. (see NZ for example, RSV is clogging up the hospitals now with young kids who had degraded their immune systems the last year or so with all the hardcore lockdowns there)
That suggests that lockdowns and vaccination together work better than vaccination alone, which is not particularly surprising. It seems, though, like you're suggesting that that means the vaccinations did nothing, which doesn't follow. It might well be that the case counts would have been twice as high if nobody had been vaccinated (or, who knows, ten times), and maybe some percentage of those additionally infected people would have died, or suffered long-term health outcomes. There's no way to know what the appropriate counterfactual is from this data alone.
Gibraltar isn't an island in the middle of the ocean. It's a tiny peninsula attached to the Spanish city of La Linea de la Concepcion. Many Gibraltarians interact with Spaniards on a daily basis. And indeed, the spike in Gibraltar cases coincides exactly with a much larger spike in cases in Spain:
Fair point but the fact remains that transmission is occurring between vaccinated persons. Nobody is disputing this. Israel is one of the higher vaccinated populations and they're at R1.1 as of today.
