JoeCartoon

The FDA's excellent NEJM article on vaccine effectiveness (forget safety for now) has caused me to look more carefully at the many criticisms of the very first trials by Pfizer and Moderna. What we find is an absolute marvel of statistical/medical manipulation, the results of which reflect wishes and not reality. It's impressive, and proof that industry knows well how to game the system, especially when regulators have every incentive to look the other way (and when the military is telling them to do so). As for the public, everyone was easily bamboozled by claims of 95-100% effectiveness, until it later proved to be an illusion at best. * The trials lasted just long enough (2-4 months) to capture an immune response but not long enough to show that it evaporates quickly after. By the time people caught on, the shot salesmen had another product to hawk from their wagons. * The trials defined fully vaccinated as two weeks following the second dose, snagging the absolute peak of response but neglecting anything else. * The trials seemed rigged to minimize participation from the population groups that were MOST vulnerable to significant medical consequences of infection while including as many non-vulnerable group as possible, thus skewing the results. * The trials claimed effectiveness against hospitalization and death but the number of unvaccinated people in those affected groups was so low as to be statistical noise. * The trials wholly excluded accounting for asymptomatic infection, which means they did not test for transmission at all, thus deleting all concerns to stop the spread and so on. * Many trials unblinded placebo groups were offered vaccines as early as Dec 2020 thus removing the control group. * Everyone knows that these virus mutate very quickly but the rushed trials dealt only with wild type, which, by the time the shot arrived, was already changing to a new variant. This was clearly not a mistake! @brownstoneinst published all these criticisms by experts as it was happening. It was extremely difficult for nonspecialist to keep up. It was like watching a magic show: you know it is not real but everything is moving too quickly to debunk it in real time. Instead, you just choose to believe. In any case, there is zero chance that all these issues and problems were mere mistakes. They were all designed to do exactly what they did, but even then the public was skeptical. At that point, the politicians decided to assist industry for force everyone to take the shot. And yet it gets better. All other boosters for variants were approved based on the old results. Hey, we already showed it works in the last trials (yeah, they were short but who cares?) so this time, we only need to poke on a few mice and be done with it! Can you believe it? I'm still gobsmacked that all this happened. Very clearly, the pharmaceutical companies are genuine experts in how to do this stuff. They had plenty of time to prepare too, like a gang plotting the heist of the century in a crime thriller.