[rajin444]

The descent from "The vaccine is 99% effective and prevents transmission" to where we're at now was pretty eye opening. It sounded too good to be true and was.

Nobody has been held accountable for coercing (and worse) the US population based on bad data. I don't see any reason to trust the government going forward.

[ChrisClark]

No one who understood the vaccine said that. But deniers still claim they did.

[oldgradstudent]

> No one who understood the vaccine said that. But deniers still claim they did.

This is historical revisionism.

The Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines were approved for a single indication, and a single indication only. Prevention of symptomatic Covid.

From the Pfizer vaccine package insert:

> COMIRNATY is a vaccine indicated for active immunization to prevent coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in individuals 12 years of age and older. (1)

They were never approved for anything else because the trials were never designed to test for anything else.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4037

In a functioning science, when reality (almost everyone got symptomatic Covid, regardless of vaccination status) conflicts with predictions (~95% efficacy in prenting symptomatic Covid), there would be some attempt to understand why the trials failed so miserably.

The obligatory Feyman quote comes to mind:

> For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled

[jewayne]

The trials showed that 95% efficacy over the initial trial period -- about 3 months, as I recall. That wasn't a made-up number.

As time went on, it became apparent that while efficacy against symptomatic COVID faded quickly, efficacy against severe COVID (I believe defined by needing hospitalization) and also against all-cause mortality remained strong. You would have had them pull a life-saving vaccine from the market on a bureaucratic technicality? That's insane.

[oldgradstudent]

> You would have had them pull a life-saving vaccine from the market on a bureaucratic technicality? That's insane.

It is not a technicality.

There are no drugs, procedures, medical devices, or vaccines without adverse effects. It is always and everywhere a tradeoff between benefits and harms. If you intentionaly terminate a trial (breaking blindness is effectively terminating it), you cannot trade off the harms and benefits because you have no idea if there are harms, or whether the benefits last.

There were drugs, devices, procedures, and even vaccines, whose massive harms were only apparent years after they were approved.

[jewayne]

> There were drugs, devices, procedures, and even vaccines, whose massive harms were only apparent years after they were approved.

However, in this case "massive harms" were incurred when people WEREN'T vaccinated. We do know, from data collected around the world, that the vaccine lowered all-cause mortality. We know that vaccine hesitancy led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.

You're right about one thing -- it's a tradeoff. And in this case the benefits were huge, and if there has been some great harm, I've yet to hear of it.

[oldgradstudent]

> However, in this case "massive harms" were incurred when people WEREN'T vaccinated

Even if it was true, do you suggest dismantling the current FDA efficacy and safety testing because it worked in one case? Is this a serious approach to risk management?

> We do know, from data collected around the world, that the vaccine lowered all-cause mortality. We know that vaccine hesitancy led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US alone.

The sad thing is that we know no such thing. Early termination of the trial made it impossible to know the real risks.

For example, it currently appears that myocarditis is diagnosed in one in 5,000 to 10,000 otherwise healthy young males (16-19 year olds)[1].

The vaccine has zero benefit in this population group because Covid is so mild in this group. In Israel, for example, exactly zero otherwise healthy 16-19 year olds died or were in any serious condition due to Covid.

In older people, and other risk groups (cancer, diabetes, obesity), the calculus is obviously different. But there was no reason to vaccinate otherwise healthy kids using a vaccine that was not tested properly.

[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.0...

[revelio]

It actually was a made up number because they didn't measure correctly. They classified people as unvaccinated even for weeks after they took the shots. This is guaranteed to inflate effectiveness. Norman Fenton has made this point repeatedly and even written simulations to demonstrate it. With the delay period they used you get to 95% effectiveness for anything, including water.

[valianteffort]

I recall government sources and pharma claiming >90% efficacy for the mRNA shots, which alone seemed absurd for a virus we knew was mutating at a rapid rate.

They also claimed you could not contract or transmit the virus if you were "vaccinated". Then redefined vaccination to fit their narrative. It took dystopian levels of misinformation for me to just lose all faith in the "experts". However honest their intentions may have been, to make claims you know aren't true is malicious at best.

[brigandish]

From [1]:

> We're not sure, at this point, that the vaccine protects you against getting infected. We know for sure it's very, very good, 94 percent, 95 percent in protecting you against clinically recognizable disease, and almost a 100 percent in protecting you for severe disease.

I'm looking at this paper[2] released in the Lancet in Feb 2022 and very, very few of the efficacy figures against severe disease show 100% effectiveness, nor anything like it in the vast majority of instances. I could be reading that big table wrong though, but the findings section has this:

> For severe COVID-19 disease, vaccine efficacy or effectiveness decreased by 10·0 percentage points (95% CI 6·1–15·4) in people of all ages and 9·5 percentage points (5·7–14·6) in older people. Most (81%) vaccine efficacy or effectiveness estimates against severe disease remained greater than 70% over time.

so I don't think I have, but happy to be corrected. The figures are certainly higher against alpha, but not 100%, that's quite an overstatement, in my view.

[1] https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/CPT/date/2020-12-10/segment... Chris Cuomo interviews Dr Fauci

[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... Duration of effectiveness of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease: results of a systematic review and meta-regression

[tmountain]

Yeah, the parent comment illustrates a misunderstanding of how vaccines work.