It's what we have, according to the designers of the various vaccines. Unless you are suggesting that all things are true unless proven otherwise, in which case I'd ask you to go back and check some books on elementary logic.
There is some work after the fact to measure the effect on Covid transmission of the vaccines, but even that isn't very promising.
It's odd when "stopping people dying" is "a huge downgrade". I suspect what you mean is that the vaccines in their current form will not get us out of the restrictions we are currently living under, which is true (and incredibly predicable).
I think it's likely that the real-world protection against death is actually lower than 100%- immune compromised people exist, and are liable to be comparatively poorly protected. And they're not part of the big efficacy trials.
Ideally you can protect them by suppressing the virus by herd immunity, which I think is actually a viable prospect with these vaccines.
The vaccines don't prevent those things. They do lower the probability - or at least, that's the claim. That's not perfection, but it's not nothing, either.
As to whether the claim is accurate... that's outside the scope of this comment.
Now look at the number of covid deaths. 2 in placebo, 1 in treatment. Relative difference 100%.
Every time you have read “100% effective against death” in 2021 onwards it was based on these pathetic numbers. The whole western world was pushed into Trumps experimental vaccine based on this study, which even has a jarring conflict of interest.
Also, they unblinded (vaccinated) the treatment group after a couple of months. This was the only halfway clean (they didn’t document a couple of severe side effects like a girl getting paralyzed) controlled study ever done.
In that context, the cardiac arrest deaths in the vaccinated group are indeed something one should look closer into.
You didn’t know that? Oh. Well, it was heavily discussed among the so-called “antivaxxers” in 2021.
But tech bros made their own bed with their participation censorship and tyranny in 2021. Including on this very platform.
Your point is well taken, but I doubt the casual reader would make the distinction that you do. And in regard to Covid deaths in the study, the people who ran it were well aware that the small number of deaths were not, by themselves, enough to establish efficacy. But in combination with the numbers for severe illness (2 in the vaccinated vs 106 for the placebo group) and everything we understood about how the disease kills, I would argue that the study does in fact overwhelmingly support the conclusion that the vaccine prevents death, just as we have since confirmed.
For a start, we could stop making claims that we don't know to be true. Replace "the vaccine is safe and effective, and if we all get the vaccine the pandemic will be over" with "the vaccine is the best tool we have to prevent serious disease and death".
In the real world, the vaccines don't provide anywhere near 99.99% protection. There are some misleading stats which claim 99.9% protection, but the trouble is that they do stuff like including a whole bunch of deaths from the winter wave which ended before vaccines were generally available and ending before the recent Delta wave. Realistically you might be able to expect somewhere around 90% reduction in the risk of death which isn't nothing but also isn't close to 100%.
Death with Covid is the baseline requirement (although, ideally, we look at death by Covid, even though that's methodologically difficult) for the above data to have any meaning for the question of whether vaccines work.
Suppose there's 0 Covid cases over the study period. Then this is exactly the result we expect to see. Approximately half the deaths being among the vaccinated, and half the deaths being among the unvaccinated. Because there's going to be heart attacks and so on in the two cohorts over the study window.
"They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness"
Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions:
1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now.
2. Were they so in the past?
To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection.
The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available.
For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths.
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave:
All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.
It's my understanding that efficacy cannot be directly compared like this, as it's a function of what variants were around during the trial, amongst other things. I believe Vice produced a good video on this recently.
Importantly, don't all vaccines currently authorised have 100% protection against death from COVID-19?
Another dumb comment. It does decrease the chance of death in the short term, but that is not the outcome since it might get everyone killed next winter or in 3 years with some effect condition caused by the experimental vaccine that we do not comprehend now
The outcome is lets says in 10 what is the excess death compared to before we started covid vaccination, or unvaccinated people
There is some work after the fact to measure the effect on Covid transmission of the vaccines, but even that isn't very promising.
It's odd when "stopping people dying" is "a huge downgrade". I suspect what you mean is that the vaccines in their current form will not get us out of the restrictions we are currently living under, which is true (and incredibly predicable).
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