[_uhtu]

Except the COVID vaccines passed clinical trials with flying colors. I believe not a single person from any of the Pfizer or Moderna trials died of COVID (people with the vaccine did, later, die of COVID, but at much, much, MUCH, lower rates than the unvaccinated). That's genuinely insane levels of drug success. You make an okay point, that the FDA needs some reform, but don't try to turn this into an anti-vax conspiracy ground, focus on actual issues where actual questionable activity exists.

[amluto]

> That's genuinely insane levels of drug success.

The trials did indeed look pretty good, and they met their primary endpoints, but they were necessarily short-term trials, and IMO they were nowhere near as impressive as some of the old impressive vaccines. Try reading up on the history of the varicella vaccine:

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/226/Supplement_4/S375/6...

Apparently you can give the vaccine after exposure, and it’s nearly 100% effective. 50 years after development and ~30 years after widespread rollout began in the US, the same vaccine still works, although the number of doses given has been increased to two because a single dose wasn’t quite good enough for herd immunity. (Chickenpox is far more contagious than at least the original COVID strain was.)

I rate the COVID vaccines as an excellent improvement for society, absolutely worth getting in most populations and unquestionably worthy of approval, but merely so-so on the scale of vaccines. (I’m not sure I rate them worthy of continued approval and widespread deployment at current prices. If nothing else, serious follow up should be required to determine how repeated use of the mRNA vaccines compares to, say, Novavax. And health agencies should consider moving to a fee-for-efficacy model instead of a we-pay-whatever model — if pharma companies know, in advance, that they’ll get paid more for doses of a better vaccine, maybe they’ll make one instead of resting on their mediocre laurels.)

[jjoonathan]

That's like calling Arnold Schwarzenegger a weakling because Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson was stronger.

[pama]

You compare apples and oranges. These are completely different viruses. There are pills like aspirin that dont help against cancer either.. and we still dont have a vaccine against SARS-1 or MERS.

[mohaine]

At least for the Pfizer study, no Covid-19–associated deaths were observed in the study or control groups so this says more about COVID and the study than about the vaccine itself.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577

[jjoonathan]

They were able to assess the efficacy by looking for illness, not death. It takes some verrrry "special" framing to twist this into anything but an enormous success:

> BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19 (95% credible interval, 90.3 to 97.6).

Yet the deaths clearly mattered when multiplied up to population scale, because COVID was able to fill up the hospitals.

[HypnoDrone]

Didn't they all die of pneumonia or some other such hand-wavey explanation so as to not outright blame covid?

[blackeyeblitzar]

Didn’t these companies ask for and get immunity from liability relating to these vaccines? What do you make of that?

Also are these products really correctly labeled as vaccines given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines? I wonder if some other term is more accurate and would eliminate some of the arguments around them.

[tlb]

Why wouldn't you ask for liability protection? No matter how safe, like even if the injection was actually pure water, thousands of people would be convinced they were injured and sue for millions which, even if you won every case, costs a fortune in legal fees.

No vaccine is perfect. They work by showing your immune system some example germ features, and most people's immune systems learn to defend against them. But immune systems are extremely complex and variable between people, and you can never guarantee a particular response.

Vaccines sometimes completely eliminate some diseases (smallpox is one). They do this not by giving every person 100% protection individually, but by reducing transmission enough that the germ dies out.

[jjoonathan]

> given their protection is imperfect and not like actual vaccines

Since when were "actual vaccines" anywhere near perfect? The COVID vaccines were unusually good for vaccines, not unusually bad.

Even a low-efficacy vaccine can still be high-efficacy in a population due to herd immunity (you don't need 100% protection, you just need to push R below 1.0 so that the infected subpopulation sees exponential decay rather than exponential growth), but we don't even need to consider this nuance in the case of the COVID vaccines because they surprised so strongly to the upside.