Reacción a "Reactions to Pfizer executive's claim that they did not test whether covid-19 vaccines stopped transmission"

There is a very important distinction to be made in relation to vaccines: 

1. Preventing transmission: means generating protective immunity that prevents the person from becoming infected and therefore having the pathogen. This would help to have herd immunity in a shorter time. 
2. Preventing severe disease-deaths-sequelae: generating immunity that protects the vaccinated individual. 

These are two very different things. Most vaccines do not prevent transmission of the target pathogen; they protect against serious infection. They are not "sterilising".  

In any case, trials to see if a vaccine prevents transmission of a pathogen are very complex, especially in the pandemic situation. The urgency was to act to induce a good immune response to stop the massacre of the pandemic in terms of deaths, seriously ill patients in ICU and hospitalisations. Reality has shown the effectiveness of the vaccines, but also that they were only slightly effective in preventing transmission of the virus.  

We have been tremendously lucky with vaccines that in less than a year showed an efficacy of more than 90% with a stupendous safety record. I think we should congratulate ourselves on that.