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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32856 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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https://rumble.com/v1nhpkq-eu-parliament-member-rob-roos-asked-a-pfizer-representative-at-a-hearing-if.html

Apparently a Pfizer executive acknowledged to some European council of wise elders that, due to moving "at the speed of science," they never tested for transmission reduction in the vaccine.

Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)

What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?

Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?

Why were people fired from their jobs and as recently as last week members of the US military were "other-than-honorably" discharged because they didn't inject the "vaccine"?

It seems people were fired for their own health, since the jabs didnt prevent transmission.

What is actually going on? I understand the argument of vaccine mandates if they prevent transmission, (even though I dislike it, and disagree, I understand the argument.) But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?

There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose. If I dosed millions of people with two shots of saline water and only counted them as vaccinated two weeks after the second saline shot, the statistics would appear such that the "saline vaccinated" were less likely to get Covid.

On Twitter, I see many many people now claiming that noone ever said the vaccines would stop the spread, they merely reduce the severity. But that feels like a bad plot forced retcon for a soap opera. Why did we shut down schools? Why did the leaders of France, UK, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the USA all say horrible things about the "unvaccinated" and the "Antivaxxers"?

Again, I don't like it, but I could almost understand it in the context of a 100% efficacious vaccine that stopped infection and transmission. But if it never substantially stopped transmission then

  1. None of the mandates make any sense, (except perhaps in terms of financial profit.)

  2. Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.

(Geert's website: https://www.voiceforscienceandsolidarity.org/)

Just for transparency, I am a staunch antivaxxer. My wife pressured me to get the jab in summer of 2020. I asked for more time. The argument of social responsibility did carry weight with me at the time. But in July of 2020 the Israeli data showed that the jabs did not prevent infection.

It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.

I thought literally everyone at the time said that the purpose was to reduce severity in most patients

The scientists said that they were only testing for proving making individuals less likely to die, which they were very good at in the pre-Omicron days.

A bunch of other people, particularly in the media, showed up and said "well, that must mean it reduces transmission, right?" and then said "it obviously reduces transmission" even though the scientists said they never tested proved that.

This is some alternate kind of motte-and-bailey, where the useful idiots say wrong things that you can claim credit for in case they turn out to be right, but disavow if they are wrong.

The scientists said that they were only testing for making individuals less likely to die, which they were very good at in the pre-Omicron days.

No, this is not what was stated, not what was requested by the FDA, and not what anyone believed about vaccines at the time. Here's the FDA guidance for development and licensure from June 2020. Scroll down to page 13 and start looking through the Efficacy Considerations section:

Either laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 or laboratory-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection is an acceptable primary endpoint for a COVID-19 vaccine efficacy trial.

This is pretty normal, what everyone would have considered the bog-standard endpoint until the Covid vaccine retconning started up. You check whether the vaccine prevents infection and you get a double-whammy - can't die from something you're not infected with and can't infect other people with something you're not infected with.

As it is possible that a COVID-19 vaccine might be much more effective in preventing severe versus mild COVID-19, sponsors should consider powering efficacy trials for formal hypothesis testing on a severe COVID-19 endpoint. Regardless, severe COVID-19 should be evaluated as a secondary endpoint (with or without formal hypothesis testing) if not evaluated as a primary endpoint.

This phrasing makes zero sense if the expectation was that the only thing anyone would test for is whether vaccination impacted severity. Severity was worth checking as a secondary endpoint precisely because it's possible that you'd impact severity without impacting likelihood of infection and transmission, but this would generally be considered a disappointing result.

Of course, that might just be what the FDA wanted to see and the companies weren't able to meet that criterion, or elected to go with other study designs. We can look at the original December 2020 emergency approval of the Pfizer vaccine though:

First primary endpoint: COVID-19 incidence per 1000 person-years of follow-up in participants without serological or virological evidence of past SARS-CoV-2 infection before and during vaccination regimen – cases confirmed ≥7 days after Dose 2

Second primary endpoint: COVID-19 incidence per 1000 person-years of follow-up in participants with and without evidence of past SARS-CoV-2 infection before and during vaccination regimen – cases confirmed ≥7 days after Dose 2

Severity shows up under the secondary efficacy endpoints. Their results:

For participants without evidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection prior to 7 days after Dose 2, VE against confirmed COVID-19 occurring at least 7 days after Dose 2 was 95.0%. The case split was 8 COVID-19 cases in the BNT162b2 group compared to 162 COVID-19 cases in the placebo group (Table 6). The 95% credible interval for the vaccine efficacy was 90.3% to 97.6%, indicating that the true VE is at least 90.3% with a 97.5% probability, which met the pre-specified success criterion.

The specificized success criterion was preventing infection. The stated effect was preventing infection. Anyone that now tells you that the scientists were only testing whether it made individuals less likely to die is badly misinformed or is telling a whopper.

You are saying "stops infection" where I am saying "stops transmission."

I guess when I said "only testing" I should have said "only proving."

What is the proposed mechanism for transmission without infection?

You are looking at "how do you get A without B" when I am looking at "given B can we stop A" which is a different thing.

Putting aside the logical incoherence of transmission without infection, I'm at least glad we can agree that your original claim that "scientists said that they were only testing for making individuals less likely to die" is demonstrably a retcon.

Putting aside the logical incoherence of transmission without infection

Yes, the thing that I never said, it is logically incoherent. Yes.

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