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Notes -
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
None of the mandates make any sense, (except perhaps in terms of financial profit.)
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'm not a fan of the vaccine mandates but there's a couple of things I think we should keep in mind here. These facts combined don't justify the mandates, but it does explain some of the situation.
Vaccine efficacy is the relative risk difference of infection, severe illness or death (3 different measures) between a vaccinated and control groups, over a set duration. This is the standard way to measure a vaccine's efficacy and it doesn't take transmission into account. It obviously doesn't take into account what happens after your experiment duration is over. So we quickly found ourselves estimating efficacy by looking at hospital admissions and vaccination base-rates once experiments were finished.
The vaccine seemed much more promising against the initial strains of the virus. If I recall correctly it prevented ~95% of infections for a few months. Such a strong efficacy against infection does a lot to prevent transmission.
There is reason to believe a milder case results in less transmission. You're spreading for shorter periods and expelling smaller viral loads. There was evidence of this. (Admittedly I don't think this is significant enough)
Testing for transmission reduction would have been infeasible. There is no standard objective way to measure this. Even with infinite money and without red tape it's not clear whether we should have counted covid particles in the infected's breathing air or something like that, and we couldn't have confidently turned into a "X % transmission reduction"
Regarding vaccinating during a pandemic, maybe Bossche is right, we'll never know. However, so far, it looks like the escaping variants we got mostly came from areas that weren't vaccinated. Perhaps it would be less risky if we didn't "meddle with nature" but we were rightly confident that the vaccines would save many vulnerable people's lives.
More people died in the vaccinated group than in the control group in Pfizer's trial.
Edit: You can downvote me all you like but the simple fact remains that more died in the vaccinated group than the control group. That's only 1 out 3 criteria but a pretty big one. By itself probably nothing but you might want to check the overall excess mortality rate of highly vaccinated countries to see if it went up or down afterwards just to be safe...
You appear to be repeating the claim referenced here. 14 people died in the control group and 15 people died in the vaccinated group - from all causes. The linked article is obviously not unbiased, but I cannot find any fault with the facts presented. Unless you're asserting that the researchers lied or miscategorized causes of death, you haven't rebutted any criteria.
But all-cause mortality is arguably the MOST important measure for any drug or vaccine - especially one meant to be given prophylactically to large numbers of healthy people, as vaccines are.
I never claimed to "rebut any criteria." I pointed out that the Pfizer trial failed 1 of the 3 criteria, arguably the most important one.
It gets worse-
9 vaccine recipients died from cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or strokes, compared to 6 placebo recipients who died of those causes. The imbalance is small but notable, considering that regulators worldwide have found that the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are linked to heart inflammation in young men.
Where can I find that argument?
You keep using "arguably" as a sneaky hidden appeal to authority, when what you mean is "In my opinion."
Yes, that's an interesting piece of information which is certainly worth following up on to see if it has any significance, but by itself it does not provide meaningful evidence for an anti-vacc argument.
Speaking of appeal to authority, we have a moderator with a poorly concealed grudge against me, speaking "ex cathedra," to apply an AP factcheck on my very true statement. Nothing you posted contradicted my factual statement in the least.
I would recommend that you not take discussions so personally as that tends to generate more heat than light, but you do you.
Dude, first of all, I was not speaking as a moderator. We're allowed to participate like everyone else. Consider addressing the arguments instead of reaching for ad hominems because you got pulled up on the facts.
You need to get rid of this persecution complex you have where every time a mod interacts with you, you think it's because we have a grudge against you. None of us have a grudge against you. We don't know you or care who you are. You started claiming a grudge the very first time you got modded as a new user, when it was impossible for anyone to have formed a personal bias against you. (I presume you are probably someone who came here from reddit, but I neither know nor care who you were there.)
That last line is the most obvious case of projection I have seen in quite a while
This never happened.
Again, I would caution you against taking these discussions so personally.
Good luck!
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