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What do you mean "prevent"? If you mean vaccines didn't completely prevent transmission, then yes. If you mean vaccines didn't prevent a proportion of transmission, then no. The vaccines did significantly reduce transmission in general.

Of course the main benefit of the vaccines was a dramatic reduction in severe disease, hospital admissions and deaths.

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They didn't affect transmission at all. Symptom reduction is also debatable since it can also be explained by immunity from previous exposure, less damaging variants and better treatments as time went on.

There's plenty of evidence that vaccines reduced transmission, especially in the earlier variants.

The idea that vaccines didn't reduce severe illness is laughable. Multiple robust tudies across many nations and institutions have been carried out, showing that several different vaccines were highly effective.

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