Army Tries to Bring Back Soldiers Booted for Refusing the COVID Vaccine

[KCfromNC]

Very common tactic of vaxxers. Its the vaccines that saved us!!! I just said that the invention of modern plumbing is what led to the decrease of disease. All of the infectious diseases decreased rapidly after that. I have studied graphs for hours, maybe it would do you well to look at them too.

Yeah, I get it, washing our hands is important.

But ignoring how well the decline in certain diseases lines up with introduction of a vaccine for that disease seems hard to miss if one actually studied graphs for hours.

Not to mention the resurgence of certain diseases correlated to the reduction in vaccine rates while indoor plumbing rates haven't changed at all.

 

[rambot]

HAHAHA. Nope, never followed Q or Alex Jones or Trump in my quest for truth.

I am staunchly anti-vax and will never allow one to be injected in me nor my children. My kids have NEVER needed a doctor at 15 and 11. How many vaxxers do you know whose kids never needed a doctor?

I laugh at this. The number of kids I know whose parents proudly say "my kids have never been to the doctor" as if that's supposed to be a great thing.
As a teacher, I see those same kids would come to school with strepthroat; with COVID; and various flus. Their attitude was "the body will heal itself". But 1) it doesn't always 2) their health impacts other people.

How many vaxxed kids do you know who have contracted measles? Or been hospitalized for it? How many vaxxed kids do you know of who've got rabies?" What about rubella? Whooping cough?

You never hear the answers to those questions

Do you honestly and truly believe that vaccinations are the reason I needed to see an endochrinologist? Do you think I got bronchitis or a bout of flu because of it?

You seem to be suggesting that your kids have "never been to a doctor" because your kids are not vaccinated? That's patently absurd.

My 11 yr old is pretty clumsy too, he gets many cuts and bruises and we allow him to run around the neighborhood and play up in trees. Never broke a bone or needed a doctor.

That's great. I broke 4 limbs, only one of which was my fault (most of my breaks were from being a very young child and some mistakes my older siblings made...ie...leaving a sliding door open). You seem to suggest that this is some kind of badge of honor to not visit a doctor. Why would you think that?

Worst thing they ever had was a fever, and hey the body knows what it's doing! They get better within a day or two. We work with the body not against it.

Lucky them. Good genes and a good diet.
My kids have only needed a doctor on a few occasions (uti, broken bones, bad strep)...NONE of those reasons can be logically connected to their being vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella, COVID, seasonal flu (sometimes), tetanus, meningitis, whooping cough..

Measles was a childhood rite of passage and 99% of people recovered fine. Even polio 98% of people recovered fine. I had chicken pox as a child I can't believe kids now are vaccinated for it.

I agree with the chicken pox one because chicken box innoculates against shingles which I understand to be pretty awful but think about what youre saying. You are suggesting that 1 or 2% of children should die instead of taking a vaccine. I'm not sure how you could advocate for a stance that would see 50,000 children dying a year instead of just getting a shot.

Tetanus is easily avoided by knowing that you stepped on something that punctured deep in your body and you CLEAN it out. Tetanus can't form with oxygen. The others are not even a risk to Americans. Flu and cold viruses are the body's way of cleaning out. If you are a toxic person that is petrified of viruses you are going to have a rough go of it.

This is the weirdest post saying "It'd be better if more children were dying because in my and my tiny communities experience my children weren't affected by these diseases".


I

 

[iluvatar5150]

'Identified'? They didn't even know about 'germs' until the 1860's, they are making an inference based on symptoms alone. I have no desire to debate the details of infectious disease, I am well past the age I thought that was fun. Most people will only dig as deep as what they are told.

How ever you want to characterize the milestones in the study of polio, the fact remains that it's been around longer than either DDT or the use of arsenic as a pesticide.

Well anyone who is a Christian knows God is in control we fear not man nor the devil, nor 'germs'. But I would be lying if I said I had no fear, of course I feel fear like everyone else, I just don't let it control my decisions.

If you don't let fear control your decisions, why don't you get your kids vaccinated?

Very common tactic of vaxxers. Its the vaccines that saved us!!!

How is that any better than your attempt at implicating DDT and arsenic for the spread of polio?

 

[DaisyDay]

You cannot compare now to a hundred years ago. Great fear tactic though. I don't live my life based on fear.

Hi - I see you changed your name from @Janelle525 to @InChristAlone525.

You can compare now to a hundred years ago - now is much healthier and more hygienic than a hundred years ago. Many diseases that were routinely lethal are now minor.

But thanks for your intense hatred of people who don't believe like you, this forum is one of the most toxic places I've ever been to

This is classic projection. Even though you carefully forewent naming names, none of those responding to you in this thread show any hatred like that, so you're seeing yourself in others.

Yes there are many Moms like me out there who raised their kids not believing in the fear tactics used by the media. Sicknesses were rampant when there was no modern plumbing and access to clean water and healthy food. But please continue to live your life as if you are back in the stone ages. Ya'll look like the zombie apocolyse, the people I hang around are healthy and strong and don't need toxic fear mongering and hate filled people around us. Praise God that He is still in control despite ya'll that would love to murder us.

The paranoia in this post is palpable. I think I will take my leave of you here. Good luck in your future endeavors.

 

[MForbes]

Very common tactic of vaxxers. Its the vaccines that saved us!!! I just said that the invention of modern plumbing is what led to the decrease of disease. All of the infectious diseases decreased rapidly after that. I have studied graphs for hours, maybe it would do you well to look at them too.

You really should provide reliable non-biased sources for all of the claims you’re making here in this forum. Otherwise, your claims are nothing but hearsay.

 

[Hans Blaster]

I'm not quite sure how this discussion drifted into one about atheism, but will point out that the desire to be a god is more prevalent than we might realize. All it takes is the desire of "My will be done." No one is immune, not a preacher in a pulpit nor a parishioner in the pew or an agnostic or an atheist. Doesn't matter. It's a subtle, insidious, thing, whether one believes in God or not.

I can think of 525 reasons...

 

[Tuur]

Have you heard of Bodie, CA? It is a ghost town. There is a lot of interesting history, but there is one thing I saw with my own 2 eyes. One year there was an influenza epidemic. The result was that there are scores of tombstones with a lamb on top. Each is the grave of a child.

No, I haven't heard of it, but am not surprised. I grew up near an old cemetery, and a grandmother used to tell me stories about those buried there. The same for the cemetery where we went to church. Unfortunately, can only remember a few of those stories.

 

[probinson]

That's true, but misses the big question: If it's caused by an immune response to the spike protein, then it should also be seen at the same rate in the unvaccinated who contracted COVID-19. That's my suspicion because both the mRNA vaccine and the actual strain of the virus had the same spike protein, and the incidents of myocarditis seem to happen at a higher rate in those with more active immune systems. If there's no difference between the unvaccinated who caught COVID-19 and the vaccinated, then being unvaccinated didn't offer protection from myocarditis.

Possibly, but consider this; you are absolutely ASSURED that your body is going to make the spike protein if you get an mRNA COVID vaccine. Moreover, the spike protein has been found all throughout the body in vaccinated people. Despite being told that it would stay in the deltoid, it absolutely did not.

So if spike protein is what causes myocarditis, why would you want to inject your body with something that would cause you to manufacture it repeatedly and run throughout your body systemically?

Also, consider that most people would now agree that nearly EVERYONE is going to get COVID if they haven't already, and likely multiple times. So if you've been vaccinated and have spike protein in your body from that, and then you get infected anyway, you're simply increasing the amount of spike protein in your body.

These are all valid hypotheses that deserve additional research. But pharmaceutical companies have ZERO incentive to continue studying their products or looking for causal links in adverse events. They have nothing to gain and everything to lose.

 

[keith99]

I agree with the chicken pox one because chicken box innoculates against shingles which I understand to be pretty awful ...

Quite the opposite. Shingles occurs because someone got chickenpox as a child, the virus then remains dormant and it resurfaces much later in life.

 

[probinson]

Post 53 admits you have no idea if you've read the studies or not.

No, I said I didn't read them when you posted them this time. But it's almost certain that I've read them at some point. I've read a lot of studies on COVID vaccine efficacy. And just like with flu vaccine efficacy studies, they never take into account healthy vacinee bias. Why would they? They can claim that vaccines "saved" people (who almost certainly would have been fine anyway) to juice the "efficacy" numbers and most people will uncritically accept that without giving it a second thought.

I get why you don't want to actually talk about healthy vaccinee bias, because it calls into question nearly every COVID vaccine study that's been done since their introduction.

The bottom line is people who are generally healthy are more likely to be vaccinated. If not accounted for, this leads to overstating efficacy as the paper I posted demonstrates. The only real way to determine efficacy is in a double-blind RCT, and that ship has long since sailed. Pfizer's results in their original trial showed a relative risk reduction of 95% with an absolute risk reduction of a fraction of 1%, meaning that well over 100 people must be vaccinated to prevent a single COVID infection. That's the best data we will ever have since there is now now incentive to run any more RCTs on vaccination. A few jabbed mice per year is all we can expect from this point forward.

 

[probinson]

Quite the opposite. Shingles occurs because someone got chickenpox as a child, the virus then remains dormant and it resurfaces much later in life.

My chickenpox-vaccinated daughter got shingles at the age of 15. She never had chickenpox.

Perhaps the mechanisms behind chickenpox and shingles are more complex than you're implying.

 

[KCfromNC]

No, I said I didn't read them when you posted them this time. But it's almost certain that I've read them at some point.

Since you're suddenly now very familiar with them, you should have no problem answering the questions you ignored when quoting my post :

Which of those studies you've now read and are sure failed to account for whatever excuse you have for trying to dismiss them? And more importantly, the statistical analysis you did to prove that this was true?

Weird you'd make me ask again - almost looks like there was an attempt to pretend I never asked in the first place.

 

[probinson]

Now here is an interesting study on whether blaming unvaccinated people (scapegoating) during the pandemic was effective or justified.

From another perspective, however, treating the unvaccinated as a uniquely responsible public health threat is not justified by the severity of the threat C19 poses and the effectiveness of C19 vaccines. It also has problematic ethical implications. One outcome of categorizing the unvaccinated as socially deviant and applying pressure to induce compliance is scapegoating, a practice that emerges in threatening or deeply uncertain situations.10 Scapegoating is generally defined as blaming an individual or a group of people who are not necessarily and solely responsible for an undesirable outcome.10–13 Once culprits are identified, blame becomes easier to assign and those recipients become seen as undeserving of respect or humanity.​

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...​

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Recall that what makes blame assignment a form of scapegoating (vs a justified response to a social threat) is that it is driven by fear or based on unfounded or inaccurate facts.10 11 13 63 64 We provide evidence that the scapegoating of the unvaccinated was not grounded in available empirical facts, but a miscalibration of risk. Our evidence for this is that while participants recognised that the elderly and people with severe comorbidities were at higher risk of hospitalisations or deaths (vs low-risk characters), they consistently overestimated the risks of C19, especially for the unvaccinated people who are not in a known high-risk group.​

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...​

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Humans often react to threats by applying generalisations driven by a miscalibration of risks, selective information retrieval or the unwillingness to update beliefs based on new information.14 56 Our data provide evidence that these processes led some people to use a single piece of information—vaccination status—as a heuristic for making judgements about the culpability of individuals, regardless of whether or not they are statistically at risk of needing care, pose a grave threat to others, have recovered from the virus and whether the vaccinated individuals have not been boosted for many months. These overgeneralisations and the resulting scapegoating are not without social and ethical implications.​

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Blaming the unvaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of political ideology and risk perceptions in the USA | Journal of Medical Ethics

​

 

[probinson]

Which of those studies you've now read and are sure failed to account for whatever excuse you have for trying to dismiss them? And more importantly, the statistical analysis you did to prove that this was true?

Do you understand what healthy vaccinee bias is? I tried to educate you with this paper. I'll post the link again with hopes that maybe you'll actually read it and stop incorrectly calling this an "excuse" and realize that it's a very real issues with observational studies of vaccine efficacy.

Closer examination of influenza vaccine policies shows that although proponents employ the rhetoric of science, the studies underlying the policy are often of low quality, and do not substantiate officials’ claims. ​

...​

So how could these studies—both published in high impact, peer reviewed journals and carried out by academic and government researchers with non-commercial funding—get it wrong? Consider one study the CDC does not cite, which found influenza vaccination associated with a 51% reduced odds of death in patients hospitalized with pneumonia (28 of 352 [8%] vaccinated subjects died versus 53 deaths among 352 [15%] unvaccinated control subjects).16 Although the results are similar to those of the studies CDC does cite, an unusual aspect of this study was that it focused on patients outside of the influenza season—when it is hard to imagine the vaccine could bring any benefit. And the authors, academics from Alberta, Canada, knew this: the purpose of the study was to demonstrate that the fantastic benefit they expected to and did find—and that others have found, such as the two studies that CDC cites—is simply implausible, and likely the product of the “healthy-user effect” (in this case, a propensity for healthier people to be more likely to get vaccinated than less healthy people). Others have gone on to demonstrate this bias to be present in other influenza vaccine studies.17 18 Healthy user bias threatens to render the observational studies, on which officials’ scientific case rests, not credible.​

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Influenza: marketing vaccine by marketing disease

The CDC pledges “To base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data, openly and objectively derived.” But Peter Doshi argues that in the case of influenza vaccinations and their marketing, this is not so Promotion of influenza vaccines is one of the most visible and...

www.bmj.com

​

Note that this was published in May 2013, long before COVID was ever a thing. This explains in detail why observational studies of vaccine efficacy are often flawed due to healthy-vaccines bias. The "healthy-user effect",as its referred to in this paper, simply states that people who are healthier are more likely to be vaccinated than less healthy people. It's really not that hard to understand.

If you vaccinate someone who is young and healthy, they get infected with COVID and survive, the observational study will claim that the vaccine saved this person's life. Likewise, if an older, unhealthy person with multiple comorbidities gets infected with COVID and dies but was not vaccinated, the observational study will assert that the person died because they were unvaccinated.

This is why randomization is so important. In reality, the young, healthy person is at an infinitesimal risk from COVID in the first place. Whether or not they were vaccinated, they almost certainly would have survived and recovered just fine. Likewise, the unhealthy unvaccinated person with multiple comorbidities is at an exponentially higher risk to begin with, and therefore may well have died even if they were vaccinated.

Observational studies that look solely at vaccination status but have not been randomized or otherwise accounted for multiple confounders are next to useless for determining actual vaccine efficacy. They are, however, incredibly useful at indiscriminately pushing vaccines on people who almost certainly don't need them.

 

[probinson]

This was published in the BMJ in 2020, before any vaccine was approved.

But what will it mean exactly when a vaccine is declared “effective”? To the public this seems fairly obvious. “The primary goal of a covid-19 vaccine is to keep people from getting very sick and dying,” a National Public Radio broadcast said bluntly.6​

​

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”7​

​

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.​

​

...​

​

In all the ongoing phase III trials for which details have been released, laboratory confirmed infections even with only mild symptoms qualify as meeting the primary endpoint definition.9101112 In Pfizer and Moderna’s trials, for example, people with only a cough and positive laboratory test would bring those trials one event closer to their completion.​

​

...​

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Severe illness requiring hospital admission, which happens in only a small fraction of symptomatic covid-19 cases, would be unlikely to occur in significant numbers in trials. Data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late April reported a symptomatic case hospitalisation ratio of 3.4% overall, varying from 1.7% in 0-49 year olds and 4.5% in 50-64 year olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over.13Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms,14 even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.​

​

Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us

The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are. Peter Doshi reports As phase III trials of covid-19 vaccines reach their target enrolments, officials have been trying to project calm...

www.bmj.com

​

Did you catch that? If the vaccine prevented people from having a mild cough, it was included in the efficacy numbers.

Are you surprised to find out the vaccine trials were NEVER intended to show a reduction in hospital admissions, ICU admissions or deaths, nor were they studied to determine their ability to interrupt transmission? They were evaluated against mild symptoms because there weren't enough people that would have severe outcomes to evaluate.

Why? Because it made it easier to claim "95% effective!" (against mild coughs) and propagandize it all over the world. And a sufficiently scared and desperate populace of useful idiots lapped it up. Not only did they believe it, then they started scapegoating people who were not actually to blame. The US federal government coined the term "Pandemic of the unvaccinated™" and a willing media pushed that narrative hard to blame and shame people into taking the vaccine.

Pfizer, Moderna and their shareholders laughed all the way to the bank as they introduced a brilliant new business model whereby the government paid them many billions of dollars for vaccines that they then coerced people to take whether they wanted them or not.

Now remember a few posts back where I showed the actual risk reduction vs. the relative risk reduction? The actual risk reduction for the vaccinated was a fraction of 1%. Therefore, the trials demonstrated that taking the vaccine would reduce your risk of a mild cough and positive COVID test by less than 1% and that over 100 people would have to receive a vaccine to prevent one infection with a mild cough.

Do you feel sufficiently duped yet? Note that this paper was published in October 2020 before any vaccine had been granted emergency use authorization, so it was well-known that the vaccines had not been studied for any reduction in severe outcomes. Yet the governments and the media the world over lied, uncritically trumpeting the press releases from Pfizer and Moderna, and the regulatory agencies (that we are supposed to trust to only approve safe and effective drugs) relentlessly pushed these vaccines that had been proven only to transitorily reduce mild symptoms.

 

[Hans Blaster]

This was published in the BMJ in 2020, before any vaccine was approved.

But what will it mean exactly when a vaccine is declared “effective”? To the public this seems fairly obvious. “The primary goal of a covid-19 vaccine is to keep people from getting very sick and dying,” a National Public Radio broadcast said bluntly.6​

​

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”7​

​

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.​

​

...​

​

In all the ongoing phase III trials for which details have been released, laboratory confirmed infections even with only mild symptoms qualify as meeting the primary endpoint definition.9101112 In Pfizer and Moderna’s trials, for example, people with only a cough and positive laboratory test would bring those trials one event closer to their completion.​

​

...​

​

Severe illness requiring hospital admission, which happens in only a small fraction of symptomatic covid-19 cases, would be unlikely to occur in significant numbers in trials. Data published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late April reported a symptomatic case hospitalisation ratio of 3.4% overall, varying from 1.7% in 0-49 year olds and 4.5% in 50-64 year olds to 7.4% in those 65 and over.13Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms,14 even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.​

​

Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us

The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are. Peter Doshi reports As phase III trials of covid-19 vaccines reach their target enrolments, officials have been trying to project calm...

www.bmj.com

​

From the linked page "ED-I-TOR-I-AL". Did *YOU* catch that? This essay was written prior to *any* published data on the efficacy of the vaccines in the real world. It seems more a warning from a professional that can be transmitted to the general public that they (we) should not expect the vaccine to provided magical perfect protection against the disease.

Did you catch that? If the vaccine prevented people from having a mild cough, it was included in the efficacy numbers.

Yes, because they were measuring the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing infection (and positive tests) and a good number of the infected only had very mild symptoms, yet were still infectious. Even if the *only* impact was to eliminate mild and stealth infections by 80% it would have still had an impact by reducing spread (those who aren't positive, can't spread).

Are you surprised to find out the vaccine trials were NEVER intended to show a reduction in hospital admissions, ICU admissions or deaths, nor were they studied to determine their ability to interrupt transmission? They were evaluated against mild symptoms because there weren't enough people that would have severe outcomes to evaluate.

Yes, it's called experimental design. To detect a 50% reduction in hospitalizations you would need a sample large enough for the difference to be statistically significant. For example (and depending on how many std dev medical research uses as a standard) ~100 hospitalizations reducing to ~50 should be enough for statistical significance, but 3 in the placebo group versus 2, or 0, or 1, or 4 in the vaccine group tells us exactly nothing.

The size of the study require to put statistically significant value on hosipitalization would have been very large. It just wasn't feasible. This was also the scaled-up safety study where all participants were monitored for reactions closely. Finally, the study was largely (or was it entirely) conducted in the summer of 2020 around New York City which didn't have a huge COVID outbreak during the period. If the study had been fortuitously planned for some place in the south where the summer outbreaks occured, it would have been better sampled on disease. (The study also excluded those most vulnerable to death - the elderly and immunocomprimised, which is pretty normal.)

Why? Because it made it easier to claim "95% effective!" (against mild coughs) and propagandize it all over the world.

Against *infections*, which (what ever the number was) it was. Not a lie. In a non-emergency situation (as best I can tell not being a medical researcher), a larger round of tests would have ensued to catch the effectiveness against more rare outcomes (like hospitalization and death) before general distribution. Instead, it was demonstrated to be safe, so they started to distribute to those most vulnerable. And infections went down and severe outcomes went way down. (I know you've been shown the plots that demonstrate this.) The post-emergency approval data from wide-spread usage is quite definitive for the initial vaccine and the initial variants of the virus.

And a sufficiently scared and desperate populace of useful idiots lapped it up. Not only did they believe it, then they started scapegoating people who were not actually to blame. The US federal government coined the term "Pandemic of the unvaccinated™" and a willing media pushed that narrative hard to blame and shame people into taking the vaccine.

You may want to reconsider who the "useful" are. (I know you won't.)

Pfizer, Moderna and their shareholders laughed all the way to the bank as they introduced a brilliant new business model whereby the government paid them many billions of dollars for vaccines that they then coerced people to take.

Perhaps you forget the time from exactly 3 years ago when the first distributions were on the cusp. Many people were almost desperate to get vaccinated. Others were hesitant in at least wanting to wait and see about adverse reactions first, but large numbers of those who were hesitant eventually decided they wanted it as well. As for me, I wasn't eager to "go first", but not being in the study area and under 50 I would have to wait until millions had gone first. By the time I got my injections in April 2021, the first signs of reduced infection *and* severe outcomes were already showing up in the older populations that had received protection months earlier and I was eager to get my shot and move on with life.

 

[probinson]

From the linked page "ED-I-TOR-I-AL". Did *YOU* catch that?

Yes. Did *YOU* catch that the "ED-I-TOR-I-AL" was published by the Associate Editor of the "B-M-J", only one of the world's oldest and most trusted medical journals?

This essay was written prior to *any* published data on the efficacy of the vaccines in the real world.

Yes, and it was talking about how the trials were not powered to determine efficacy against severe outcomes from COVID but rather whether or not someone had a mild cough. Do you dispute that point?

It seems more a warning from a professional that can be transmitted to the general public that they (we) should not expect the vaccine to provided magical perfect protection against the disease.

Well, that's a bit of a dilution (to say the least) of what the article ACTUALLY says. It makes the exact point I am trying to make. It begins:

The world has bet the farm on vaccines as the solution to the pandemic, but the trials are not focused on answering the questions many might assume they are. Peter Doshi reports​

​

As phase III trials of covid-19 vaccines reach their target enrolments, officials have been trying to project calm. The US coronavirus czar Anthony Fauci and the Food and Drug Administration leadership have offered public assurances that established procedures will be followed.1234 Only a “safe and effective” vaccine will be approved, they say, and nine vaccine manufacturers issued a rare joint statement pledging not to prematurely seek regulatory review.5​

​

But what will it mean exactly when a vaccine is declared “effective”? To the public this seems fairly obvious. “The primary goal of a covid-19 vaccine is to keep people from getting very sick and dying,” a National Public Radio broadcast said bluntly.6​

​

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”7​

​

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.​

It's clear what the public's expectations were and what the expectations were of COVID vaccine enthusiast Dr. Peter Hotez. Yet it was known from the beginning that the trials COULD NOT answer these questions. Public health experts and media alike were content to let people continue to believe that an "effective" vaccine meant what they thought it meant even though it was abundantly clear that the studies could not answer ANY of those questions.

Yes, because they were measuring the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing infection (and positive tests) and a good number of the infected only had very mild symptoms, yet were still infectious.

Ah. So the vaccine was measured for its efficacy to prevent "very mild symptoms". Thanks for confirming.

Even if the *only* impact was to eliminate mild and stealth infections by 80% it would have still had an impact by reducing spread (those who aren't positive, can't spread).

But the study wasn't designed to look for an impact on reducing spread. It was designed to look for reducing mild coughs. I suppose if you want to attempt to extrapolate this to say that someone without a mild cough can't infect someone that's your prerogative, but that seems a bit of a stretch.

Yes, it's called experimental design. To detect a 50% reduction in hospitalizations you would need a sample large enough for the difference to be statistically significant. For example (and depending on how many std dev medical research uses as a standard) ~100 hospitalizations reducing to ~50 should be enough for statistical significance, but 3 in the placebo group versus 2, or 0, or 1, or 4 in the vaccine group tells us exactly nothing.

The size of the study require to put statistically significant value on hosipitalization would have been very large. It just wasn't feasible.

So the disease wasn't severe enough in the vast majority of people and "it just wasn't feasible" to enroll a population large enough to detect a statistically significant benefit in severe outcomes. Tell me how severe this disease was again?

This was also the scaled-up safety study where all participants were monitored for reactions closely.

Yeah, about that... here's another article from the BMJ you might find interesting.

But, for researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety. A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. ​

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Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial

Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports In autumn 2020 Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, Albert Bourla, released an open...

www.bmj.com

​

Doesn't sound like they were being monitored all the closely for adverse events after all.

Finally, the study was largely (or was it entirely) conducted in the summer of 2020 around New York City which didn't have a huge COVID outbreak during the period. If the study had been fortuitously planned for some place in the south where the summer outbreaks occured, it would have been better sampled on disease. (The study also excluded those most vulnerable to death - the elderly and immunocomprimised, which is pretty normal.)

So they tested the vaccine on a largely healthy population that was at low risk to begin with. Pretty smart if you're trying to create marketing hype for the vaccine rather than actually determine if it's efficacious against severe outcomes.

Against *infections*, which (what ever the number was) it was. Not a lie.

Except "infections" was broadly defined to include mild coughs and a positive test. The old axiom "Numbers don't lie. Liars use numbers" comes to mind. While it may not have been a "lie", it was incredibly and intentionally misleading.

In a non-emergency situation (as best I can tell not being a medical researcher), a larger round of tests would have ensued to catch the effectiveness against more rare outcomes (like hospitalization and death) before general distribution.

Yes, because CLINICAL OUTCOMES are what is important. A vaccine that may or may not prevent a mild cough is not all that useful.

Instead, it was demonstrated to be safe,

Of course it was. If you don't follow up on adverse events in the trial, you'll think it's "safe". Can't find what you're not looking for.

so they started to distribute to those most vulnerable. And infections went down and severe outcomes went way down. (I know you've been shown the plots that demonstrate this.)

Most of those plots are based on highly questionable models. The plots that claim "MILLIONS" were saved by COVID vaccines are some of the most implausible nonsense ever published.

The post-emergency approval data from wide-spread usage is quite definitive for the initial vaccine and the initial variants of the virus.

Sure it is. Because much like the trial itself, there is a considerable and immeasurable healthy-vaccinee bias baked into all of the results.

Perhaps you forget the time from exactly 3 years ago when the first distributions were on the cusp. Many people were almost desperate to get vaccinated.

That's because democrats and liberals in particular had overestimated the actual risk of the virus by many orders of magnitude. If you read the study I posted above regarding scapegoating the unvaccinated, liberals and democrats incorrectly believed that the risk of hospitalization if you were infected with COVID was somewhere around 50%. It was closer to 1%

Second, representative polls done prior to data collection suggest that liberals were more likely to overestimate C19 risks. A Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study conducted in the second half of 2020 asked US residents to estimate the percentage of C19 infections that result in hospitalisation (the correct number at the time was between 1% and 5%18). The poll showed that around 41% of Democrats (and 28% of Republicans) estimated this rate to be 50% or higher, and more Republicans (26%) than Democrats (10%) estimated the hospitalisation rate correctly at 1%–5%.​

No matter what you think about all other aspects of the pandemic, it is a MASSIVE failing of public health that so many people so severely overestimated the hospitalization rate of an infection. Some might posit that this misperception was by design, because as you correctly stated, these people were DESPERATE to get vaccinated. That desperation was borne from a fear based on wildly inflated perceptions of the risk the disease posed to them.

I mean really, who wants a mild cough anyway? If you can get a vaccine 3 or 4 times a year that ensures you never cough again, who wouldn't want that?!

Others were hesitant in at least wanting to wait and see about adverse reactions first, but large numbers of those who were hesitant eventually decided they wanted it as well.

True enough, but still millions more were coerced into vaccination whether they wanted it or not. The vaccine was apparently so good, we had to threaten people's livelihoods to get them to take it and institute all sorts of illogical and nonsensical mandates and policies that were badly contradictory on their face. This has caused incalculable damage to trust in public health and in vaccinations in general. It's why vaccination rates are down across the board. Those who favored mandating COVID vaccines own this looming public health crisis concerning vaccines.

As for me, I wasn't eager to "go first", but not being in the study area and under 50 I would have to wait until millions had gone first. By the time I got my injections in April 2021, the first signs of reduced infection *and* severe outcomes were already showing up in the older populations that had received protection months earlier and I was eager to get my shot and move on with life.

Still many more NEVER got their shot and moved on with life just fine.

The point is, the vaccine mandates and the prejudicial steps taken to coerce a largely healthy population into getting vaccinated was never justified. The vaccine did not prevent infections. It did not slow transmission. It may have provided a personal benefit to those at the highest risk. It should always have been a personal choice.

 

[probinson]

Meanwhile, the Director of the CDC is concerned that vaccinations for respiratory viruses are "too low" for her liking. The absolute worst thing that could happen for the marketing of the flu vaccine is to have a flu season with low vaccination rates that has little to no impact on its severity.

It should be pretty clear from these incredibly low uptake numbers that the vast majority of the population has lost trust in the CDC's recommendations concerning these vaccinations. Unless you want to try to pretend like 84% of the country is now somehow "antivax"...

 

[Hans Blaster]

Yes. Did *YOU* catch that the "ED-I-TOR-I-AL" was published by the Associate Editor of the "B-M-J", only one of the world's oldest and most trusted medical journals?

Yeah? So? Who else would write an editorial, the accountant. It's still not a scientific article, just a commentary. As for the Journal. I've never heard of it (or published in it), I'll take your word for it that it is a good journal.

Yes, and it was talking about how the trials were not powered to determine efficacy against severe outcomes from COVID but rather whether or not someone had a mild cough. Do you dispute that point?

Ah. So the vaccine was measured for its efficacy to prevent "very mild symptoms". Thanks for confirming.


But the study wasn't designed to look for an impact on reducing spread. It was designed to look for reducing mild coughs. I suppose if you want to attempt to extrapolate this to say that someone without a mild cough can't infect someone that's your prerogative, but that seems a bit of a stretch.

Cough. Cough. Cough. (and a positive test)

They were counting infections with and without the vaccine.

So the disease wasn't severe enough in the vast majority of people and "it just wasn't feasible" to enroll a population large enough to detect a statistically significant benefit in severe outcomes. Tell me how severe this disease was again?

What? Are you denying COVID was serious?

As I recall about 1-2% of cases in the early phases (2020) DIED. That's about 10 times the fatality rate of annual flu (as opposed to the major pandemics like 1919) with 10-20 or so hospitalized per death for the flu. I don't recall the ratio for COVID19.

These studies take months and they couldn't predict where the latest outbreaks would be during the test.

Yeah, about that... here's another article from the BMJ you might find interesting.

But, for researchers who were testing Pfizer’s vaccine at several sites in Texas during that autumn, speed may have come at the cost of data integrity and patient safety. A regional director who was employed at the research organisation Ventavia Research Group has told The BMJ that the company falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial. ​

​

Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial

Revelations of poor practices at a contract research company helping to carry out Pfizer’s pivotal covid-19 vaccine trial raise questions about data integrity and regulatory oversight. Paul D Thacker reports In autumn 2020 Pfizer’s chairman and chief executive, Albert Bourla, released an open...

www.bmj.com

​

Doesn't sound like they were being monitored all the closely for adverse events after all.

Sounds like a problem with a subset of the data, not the whole study, if accurate.

So they tested the vaccine on a largely healthy population that was at low risk to begin with. Pretty smart if you're trying to create marketing hype for the vaccine rather than actually determine if it's efficacious against severe outcomes.



Except "infections" was broadly defined to include mild coughs and a positive test. The old axiom "Numbers don't lie. Liars use numbers" comes to mind. While it may not have been a "lie", it was incredibly and intentionally misleading.

Because those *are* infections. The uninfected don't transmit.

Yes, because CLINICAL OUTCOMES are what is important. A vaccine that may or may not prevent a mild cough is not all that useful.



Of course it was. If you don't follow up on adverse events in the trial, you'll think it's "safe". Can't find what you're not looking for.

At this point, all I see is a desire to attack the vaccine, etc.

Most of those plots are based on highly questionable models. The plots that claim "MILLIONS" were saved by COVID vaccines are some of the most implausible nonsense ever published.

No models needed. They were literally case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths versus time plots. Once vaccines were wide spread the ratio of deaths and hospitaliztions to cases went way down. The effectiveness of the vaccinations against severe disease for the first few variants was clarly shown.

Sure it is. Because much like the trial itself, there is a considerable and immeasurable healthy-vaccinee bias baked into all of the results.



That's because democrats and liberals in particular had overestimated the actual risk of the virus by many orders of magnitude. If you read the study I posted above regarding scapegoating the unvaccinated, liberals and democrats incorrectly believed that the risk of hospitalization if you were infected with COVID was somewhere around 50%. It was closer to 1%

Now you're on to politics. I'm done with this and you.

Second, representative polls done prior to data collection suggest that liberals were more likely to overestimate C19 risks. A Franklin Templeton-Gallup Economics of Recovery Study conducted in the second half of 2020 asked US residents to estimate the percentage of C19 infections that result in hospitalisation (the correct number at the time was between 1% and 5%18). The poll showed that around 41% of Democrats (and 28% of Republicans) estimated this rate to be 50% or higher, and more Republicans (26%) than Democrats (10%) estimated the hospitalisation rate correctly at 1%–5%.​

No matter what you think about all other aspects of the pandemic, it is a MASSIVE failing of public health that so many people so severely overestimated the hospitalization rate of an infection. Some might posit that this misperception was by design, because as you correctly stated, these people were DESPERATE to get vaccinated. That desperation was borne from a fear based on wildly inflated perceptions of the risk the disease posed to them.

I mean really, who wants a mild cough anyway? If you can get a vaccine 3 or 4 times a year that ensures you never cough again, who wouldn't want that?!



True enough, but still millions more were coerced into vaccination whether they wanted it or not. The vaccine was apparently so good, we had to threaten people's livelihoods to get them to take it and institute all sorts of illogical and nonsensical mandates and policies that were badly contradictory on their face. This has caused incalculable damage to trust in public health and in vaccinations in general. It's why vaccination rates are down across the board. Those who favored mandating COVID vaccines own this looming public health crisis concerning vaccines.



Still many more NEVER got their shot and moved on with life just fine.

The point is, the vaccine mandates and the prejudicial steps taken to coerce a largely healthy population into getting vaccinated was never justified. The vaccine did not prevent infections. It did not slow transmission. It may have provided a personal benefit to those at the highest risk. It should always have been a personal choice.

 

[USincognito]

Anecdotally speaking, how many people do you personally know that have NOT had COVID? I'm not sure I could name a single person that hasn't had it. Everyone in my family has had it. Every one of my friends has had it. Everyone in my social circles has had it. Everyone at work has had it. Vaccinated or not, they all got COVID, and there wasn't a discernible difference in severity of disease in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated people. Some vaccinated people had it worse than unvaccinated and vice versa. At best it was a crap shoot of how sick they got irrespective of vaccination status.

I'm curious if that's the same for others.

I haven't had it or, if I did, my symptoms were literally so mild I didn't notice and apparently I didn't spread it to anyone. My brother, sister-in-law and mother haven't had it. I'm aware of three coworkers who have tested positive, though I only started working here in June 2021. About 35 others are either no, or unknown by me.