> although with a significant decrease in risk of catching or passing on the virus. With these effects waning on a time-scale similar to the first two doses.
Food for thought: https://www.ucdavis.edu/health/covid-19/news/viral-loads-sim...
Or the actual paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.28.21264262v...
The vaccine seems to result in less symptoms and makes your body clear the virus faster, but the evidence is coming in that peak viral load is not changed.
To me, this is the nightmare scenario of us going forward with emergency use authorizations. The whole theory behind the vaccine was that if your body was primed to handle the spike protein, you'd clear it faster and you'd feel better and critically: that you'd actually spread less virus because your body won't collect as much of it waiting for your immune system to react.
But only the first two parts of that ended up being true, because it appears that peak viral load isn't impacted. So now if you're vaaccinated, you feel fine so you don't test yourself and you don't isolate, but you're still spreading the virus as much as before, and r0 across the entire population is basically unchanged. It would almost be better for others if you weren't vaccinated, because you would have a lower chance of presenting asymptomatically and would be more likely to isolate.
The only silver lining is that it seems to clear faster, so the timespan where you're walking around with a high viral load (ie: superspreader) is smaller. But this isn't what they wanted.