Alaska Airlines’ Disappointing New Employee Vaccination Policy

Yeah, I wasn't real clear about that. What I meant to say is that when you get infected, what's happing is that individual viruses have to be taken into cells in your body, and those cells then make a bunch more viruses that spread to neighboring cells. This all takes a certain amount of time, and it's during that time that your immune system gloms onto those viruses and destroys them, both at the point they first enter your body and later when they're spreading from cell to cell. Antibodies play a key role, of course, but they're far from the whole story. (It's a very interesting story, too, but pretty far off-topic here.)

Anyway, the quicker your immune system suppresses the spread of virus within the body, the smaller the chance that you'll become noticeably ill or contagious. But it's not an all-or-nothing process, and it makes no real sense to talk about being 100% protected, or fully immune, or whatever. Nevertheless, if your immune system is normal and vaccinated, and so is your neighbor's, then your chance of catching or spreading the disease is very low. (It's more likely that the Cubs are going to win the World Series again this year).

Since we still know no good way to keep covid viruses from being generated when they're inside cells, the best we can do is to rev up the immune system. And by far the most reliable and effective way to do that is vaccination. Unfortunately, this line of thinking gets lost in the fog of politics, fear of needles, righteous indignation about "personal rights", distrust of big pharma, and so on. We end up with big entities like Alaska waffling and placating the loudest complainers. I guess it has something to do with their profits, because it's certainly counterproductive in terms of combating covid.

Look at it this way: On Air France you can't get on a domestic flight (in France) without proof of vaccination or of a very recent negative test, and all their FAs are immunized. On whose flights would you think you'd have the lowest risk of catching or spreading covid, Air France's or Alaska's?

Well, vaccines against viral diseases have been around that long, so we have lots of experience with the relationship between the immunization rate in a population and the way a disease continues to spread (or not) in an epidemic.

As for coronaviruses in particular: they have surely been around since before we had the technology to recognize and categorize them, which didn't happen until about 100 years ago. But they circulate primarily in animal populations, so people didn't study them much until the past 20 years or so, when they caused a few well-contained, non-epidemic outbreaks of severe illness in humans. The specific coronavirus that caused the current pandemic (named SARS-CoV-2) was identified in 2019 -- hence the name of the disease it causes: COronaVIrus Disease 2019 = "covid-19".

Yes, that's a good point about the "current" coronavirus strain being recent even though it's been known for 100 years or so (not just 50 years) that various coronaviruses cause infections in animals and humans as well. Knowing how the coronavirus "family" has behaved in the past was extremely valuable in figuring out so quickly how the current one worked, and it certainly helped in designing an effective vaccine.

The downside, of course, is what's implied by there being a "current" coronavirus in the first place, namely, that coronaviruses evolve so that we have to deal with new variations that behave differently than their predecessors. For example, it was more straightforward to protect people against smallpox, which never really changed much over the years, than against influenza viruses, which tend to evolve differently-behaving strains every year.

Coronaviruses seem to fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, so it may become necessary to update the basic covid vaccine to deal with that. Moderna, Pfizer, et al. wouldn't mind since it would keep them in the business of developing new covid vaccines forever, but in the long run it's a good guess that we'll end up with a pretty mundane solution to the problem, like having people get a combined two-vaccine flu+covid shot every year.

None of which changes the point of this article, which is that Alaska's policy in regard to covid prevention seems pretty half-a**ed.

Funny, I just browsed through your reference point and it says the exact opposite.
"If you are fully vaccinated and become infected with the Delta variant, you can spread the virus to others."
"People with weakened immune systems, including people who take immunosuppressive medications, may not be protected even if fully vaccinated"
It says only a small proportion of vaxxed people become infected, but there are so many other tidbits like "what we know"(so far) and "" what ee are learning" and pretty much requires you to use the same protocols in public to avoid becoming infected and transmitting the disease.
I would venture to say that most vaxxed individuals are more dangerous to unvaxxed ones, not the other way around, due to to thier miguided belief that they cannot pass it onto others, even though the CDC says otherwise.
The more you read into it, the easier it is to realize how fluid the situation is and how much we don't know, and the wording is written up to reflect that.
This reflects the problems with rushing out a vaccine before the true parameters of the virus are established, like virtually every other disease or contagion we currently vaccinate against now.
To try and shame people for being hesitant and mistrusting the people calling shots is really sad and indicative of an agenda as opposed to a sincere outreach for public safety.