[peter422]

So they ran the phase 2/3 trial in >1000 humans for fun?

The problem with anti-vaxxers is you just imagine a world in which everything is underhanded and a conspiracy when all the science and data is out there in the open, just ignored.

[taolegal]

Anti-vax? You have no clue what my beliefs are on this, I'm not anti-vaccine. I remember just last year the Biden administration forced through the booster shots (after a propaganda campaign predicated one & done, that then extended into mandates, which Biden, Pelosi & others said were never on the table or illegal, later to be proven unconstitutional by the supreme court).

Senior officials at the FDA resigned over the insufficient evidence of efficacy. Not only was it unclear that they should be approved for seniors, they just opened it up to everyone. It's only gotten worse now. It's not even remotely clear to me that the average healthy person (not on the standard American diet, chronically ill with the typical stuff like diabetes & obesity) needs upwards of 4 vaccines, and counting, for a virus that's much more attenuated & practically everyone has some form of immunity at this point.

Also: to answer your question, from what I can tell the studies haven't shown efficacy. They only show that antibodies rose, which we know isn't absolute proof of efficacy with regards to infection or disease.

[peter422]

I never said the trials showed efficacy, though there are multiple high quality trials which do show serious benefits of 3rd/4th shots in various age groups. I just say they ran human trials, which your comment implied they didn’t.

Also:

- no good evidence the virus is attenuated (lower hospitalizations/mortality likely driven by increased population immunity)

- a lot of FDA/CDC officials agreed with the decision too, and I think on the whole were proved right to offer to the booster to older populations before all the studies were completed.

- nobody is forcing you to get the 3rd/4th shots, why do you want to prevent other people from getting them if they want them? You are sooo sure they are bad?

[taolegal]

Sure let people get them voluntarily. My point is that all this irrational exuberance is very clearly precipitously eroding trust in public health authority & science generally.

[autoexec]

> My point is that all this irrational exuberance is very clearly precipitously eroding trust in public health authority & science generally.

Nobody needs vaccines for this. We have actual evidence of doctors who got kickbacks for giving patients addictive drugs they didn't need, of pharmaceutical companies lying about known risks, of scientific papers that are nonsense being published, of the CDC lying to the public because they didn't trust us to act like adults and not stockpile masks. There is a US doctor telling her patients that their illnesses are caused by alien DNA and demon sperm, and she's still allowed to keep her medical license. These are hurting trust in science and public health.

I don't blame people for being skeptical of what's going on, but far too often what people are doing is just putting their trust into whatever backs up what they've already decided must be true. People who thought the vaccines were bad before they had any evidence at all to support that have total faith in every study and doctor they can find which might support their position while insisting that the mountain of evidence that contradicts them is a lie cooked up by a conspiracy.

Everyone should be distrustful of research papers, doctors, and public health agencies right now. They earned that, but that just makes it more important that people do a better job of avoiding their own biases and evaluating the imperfect information we have. For all the problems that exist in science, when the vast majority of scientists are telling us something it's best that we listen. We should be most cautious when listening to people who are telling us what we want to hear.

[peter422]

You incorrectly said 3 posts ago that the new boosters were only tested in mouse models.

You are actively attempting to erode trust in public health and then lamenting that people are losing trust in public health. Give me a break.

[taolegal]

If you're going to unveil a new vaccine it should be proven to be effective. Anything else at this point (when practically everyone has developed an immune response through infection or previous vaccination) is unethical.

The mouse models were challenge studies, i.e. how do vaccinated mice respond to exposure to the omicron variant? That's what matters. Versus what you are demagoguing. Conflating with "tested", that since the new booster was given to humans and no abnormal AEs were observed & antibody levels rose, that automatically means it must be effective.

This is precisely the scenario that degrades public trust in institutions when this fast-and-loose science is being rolled-out live on large populations.

[peter422]

Don’t take it then, nobody is forcing you.

However this exact issue you are talking about was debated at the public FDA hearing on whether or not to approve the updated boosters. Most, but not all, of the people on the committee believed that it was worth the risk with incomplete information.

It isn’t ethical or possible to run the studies you want given the existing prevalence in the virus, so you do the best you can. It isn’t fast-and-loose to make decisions with imperfect data when all you have is imperfect data.

Also there were even more interesting and nuanced arguments against the updated booster but evidently you didn’t read the FDA meeting notes and see the arguments from the couple people who voted against it. Oh well.

[scarface74]

How is the booster even a political talking point? Even Trump has been advocating the booster.

The facts on the ground changed around July 2021 with the advent of the variants.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> It's not even remotely clear to me ...

and the reasons why it should be clear to you are what, precisely?

Do you have some particular expertise in public health? Or are just another person who believes that applying their own intelligence and internet sleuthing skills are sufficient to allow them to question the decisions made by people who make this sort of thing their life's work?

[spookthesunset]

Science requires participation to work. If these “experts” cannot explain their data and people can’t reproduce their results… something is badly wrong.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Neither "experts" nor anybody else have any obligation to convince every skeptic of their position, even if it is preferable for them to explain the data they get from reproducable studies.

[peteradio]

I'm sure the Army would love to have the draft and would make it their life's work to get every American to be all they can be. Every American has to sleuth their way through the rat race or you will be taken for a sucker.

[spookthesunset]

It doesn’t require a conspiracy to think something is majorly wrong with how the last 2.5 years were handled. Everybody played to their incentives and thought they were doing the right thing. The outcome was a complete disaster and a horrific overreaction. But people thought they were doing the right thing.

It’s kind of like a modern engineering failure. It takes multiple failures to bring down complex, redundant systems. That is what happened here.

> when all the science and data is out there in the open, just ignored.

I lost count of the number of times somebody yelled or called me “dangerous” for showing this data. Most of the public data goes directly against the narrative people like to push. It gets tossed right into the “conspiracy” bin. Virtually nothing about our response was based on science or data.

[peter422]

> Virtually nothing about our response was based on science or data.

Virtually nothing?

So the thousands and thousands of studies on vaccines, treatments, mask policies, vaccine policies, school policies, air filtration techniques, etc, etc… those were just done for no reason?

To say we live in an imperfect society with imperfect leaders and imperfect citizens is a fair point. Incorrect decisions were and continue to be made for political reasons or religious reasons or whatever else. That’s what happens in an imperfect society. To say “virtually nothing” about the response is based on data is just ridiculous.

Again, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists make up a world where decisions are made in secret for suspicious reasons when generally all the data and arguments are out in the open and are just ignored.

[spookthesunset]

> anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists

Are all the highly esteemed professors, scientists, politicians, healthcare workers, and researchers who signed the great barrington declaration anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists?

Do you have any idea how many people in real life yelled at me and called me incredibly nasty things for suggesting that maybe, just maybe this myopic fixation on Covid was going to have some serious long term effects and maybe, just maybe we are overreacting?

You can’t speak against the narrative. Speaking out against what we did was and still is career suicide if you are in healthcare, science or research.

There has been a continual incredibly strong push to label anything that goes against “the narrative” as misinformation, “anti-whatever”. Speaking out as a member of the medical/science community gets you blacklisted. Beware of any research that got published in the heat of this mess—there were strong incentives to only publish research that supported “the narrative”.

[peter422]

There is a huge difference between saying we made a lot of mistakes in the response to covid and saying “virtually nothing” was based on data.

I don’t support people being shut down as you talk about, however you should also appreciate that a ton of people speaking out against the “narrative” were just grifters spreading misinformation for whatever random reason. A lot of the blame for legitimate dissent being ignored is due to the fact that most dissenting views were actively in bad faith.

[omniglottal]

Do not make such assumptions - it is against the guidelines and is abusive to the notion that we can engage in dialogue here in good faith.