Peter H Proctor MD, PhD

So the theory is that physicians secretly want people sick because sick people come back? Do plumbers secretly hope your pipes burst again? Does an electrician warn you not to overload an outlet because house fires are good for business? Medicine has plenty to criticize, but the idea that we “prevent healthy outcomes” requires ignoring an enormous amount of reality. Cancer survival has improved. Deaths from acute heart attacks have fallen dramatically. Trauma care saves people who would have died a generation ago. Vaccines emptied pediatric wards of diseases that used to fill them. And during COVID, we were quite pleased when the ICUs finally stopped being packed with people in respiratory failure. Strange behavior for an industry supposedly depending on endless illness. The goal is fewer strokes, fewer infarctions, fewer cancers, fewer infections, fewer amputations, fewer ICU beds occupied. A healthier patient is not a failed business model. It is the point.

Apparently some people need the same lesson every year. No, the COVID vaccine does not create sterilizing immunity. But in a 2026 JAMA Network Open household study, recent vaccination was associated with nearly a 50% reduction in transmission to household contacts compared with unvaccinated primary cases. And the 2025–26 updated vaccine still reduced COVID hospitalization by about 53–55% in recent U.S. data. So yes: It can reduce your chance of getting sick. It can reduce your chance of severe disease. And it can reduce your chance of passing the virus to someone else. None of those effects are absolute. No serious person claims they are. The remarkable part is watching someone in 2026 announce, with great confidence, that a vaccine must either stop every infection and every transmission or it “does nothing.” That is a toddler’s definition of efficacy.