You are making numerous claims throughout this thread without a single citation.
Where can I find a study that supports this:
"There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.
Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies."
lolol, "There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more."
This is a statement that has many claims:
1. 95% implementation (whatever that means) in a specified time window of initial vaccine could've produced herd immunity
2. This herd immunity would've made it "several orders of more difficult" for the virus to mutate
3 The estimate of a 50% reduction in death toll.
I certainly can't remember something that didn't happen, herd immunity that *would've made mutation more difficult" or a "50% reduction" that didn't happen.
Your memory must be better than mine, it remembers statistics and estimates from counterfactual events.
I'm not. This argument is not reasonable and looks suspiciously like working backwards from a desired outcome to something that sounds like a scientific justification.
Firstly, the vaccines seem "effective" against variants, using the current definition of effectiveness of just reducing symptoms.
Secondly, no vaccine in history has come with a disclaimer that it doesn't work unless 100% of the population is vaccinated. That's not the definition of what vaccines do. Vaccines give individual protection. If these vaccines had been advertised as requiring that, would they have been approved? It is hard to see how because believing this raises fundamental questions, questions like: given that people cannot all be vaccinated simultaneously, how quickly is it required to get to 100% vaccination before the vaccine becomes useless? This variable would seem to be critical for any such "vaccine" yet no such time dimension is available, probably because no study would have ever been created to try and discover that - because there's no scientific basis for determining it.
Thirdly, governments were saying very clearly that estimates of herd immunity were in the 60-70% range - very far from everyone. Why are people now claiming that this was wrong? On what basis? And if it was wrong, why should anyone believe any claims about vaccines at all?
There was a substack where someone took the deaths during Pfizer's trial (the same one where 95% effective came from) and compared it to the CDC's estimate of number of injections to prevent a death, they came up with something insane like 5 vaccine-caused deaths to prevent 1 virus-caused death. Major caveats were included because all the numbers were small (IIRC it was 16 deaths in the vaccine group and 14 deaths in the control group, for example), but it otherwise checked out.
That said, also keep in mind the much-touted 95% effective came from 8 and 170 cases out of around 40000 participants.
Vaccines cut down the hospitalization and death rate 20 to 60-fold. They reduce transmission by a substantial amount. That means they work. Why are you nitpicking and purposely ignoring the titanic scientific achievement of developing cheap vaccines, deployed by the billions in the span of a year, that literally avoided tens of millions of deaths?
It's clear you're not here to make good-faith arguments.
The level of effectiveness at preventing spread wasn’t known - that’s harder to measure - and since the protective effects were so strong there wasn’t an approval delay trying to get those numbers.
If memory serves, the subsequent data suggested that we could have reached herd immunity with something like 90% vaccination rates against the original strain. Delta and especially Omicron put paid to that, however, and closed any chance of most people being able to avoid infection.
The measured outcomes in the initial vaccine trials were over 90% reduction in hospitalizations and deaths. That is what was known for sure at the time vaccines were rolled out. A reduction in transmission would have been a nice additional benefit, but the trials were not set up to measure if it had happened.
Since you got such a basic fact wrong, you might consider what else you've misunderstood and why. Then you can take steps to correct it.
That’s a solid repetition of antivax talking points but none of it is accurate. Data was being collected during the trials and in other studies but it’s harder because you also need to establish the direction of spread, which in the simple PCR model you outlined would require testing not only the person in the trial but everyone around them with timing precise enough to start establishing direction (if my wife and I both get sick and she’s in the vaccine trial, a point in time PCR showing both of us with antibodies doesn’t distinguish between the vaccine failing to prevent her from giving it to me or the reverse).
When the efficacy of the vaccines was so high for preventing serious cases, it would have been a medical ethics problem to delay getting them out to the public while trying to get better data on spread.
When that kind of data did come out later, it showed strong effects — unfortunately, as noted this was against Alpha and Delta was already chipping away at efficacy:
> Two studies1,2 from Israel, posted as preprints on 16 July, find that two doses of the vaccine made by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, based in New York City, and biotechnology company BioNTech, based in Mainz, Germany, are 81% effective at preventing SARS-CoV-2 infections. And vaccinated people who do get infected are up to 78% less likely to spread the virus to household members than are unvaccinated people. Overall, this adds up to very high protection against transmission, say researchers.
> Before the emergence of the B.1.617.2 (delta) variant of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), vaccination reduced transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from vaccinated persons who became infected, potentially by reducing viral loads. Although vaccination still lowers the risk of infection, similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated persons who are infected with the delta variant call into question the degree to which vaccination prevents transmission.
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.
Not all the vaccines worked. You are taking for granted the knowledge we have now about the vaccine efficacy.
If there were no efficacy studies we could easily have wasted precious manufacturing and logistical resources in an ineffective vaccine which would have cost even more lives.
Not to mention increasing the vaccine hesitancy which is already a massive problem.
That is really just rewriting history. Vaccines were presented as having an efficiency of around 90% after the second dose - meaning that only around 8% of people (for Pfizer) in the trials actually got sick, all the graphs and charts from the beginning of the year were about this. The fact that now we are rewriting the history books will not help at all in the trust of the public, especially the ones that still didn't get it.
That is a dramatic misrepresentation of that preprint. The number of deaths is small enough that it is hard to draw inferences from it, and that was not the endpoint of the study. Rather, the key finding is a vaccine effectiveness of 97% against severe disease.
A preprint that did address deaths[1] found a vaccine effectiveness of 98.7% against death. This is not consistent with your claim of "no evidence."
Yes, that was in the first couple months of the vaccine when they were extremely effective. We soon discovered they didn’t last and the virus mutated.
We skipped the long-term studies.
I got the year wrong obviously. We didn’t have the vaccine in June 2020.
By the summer of 2021 the story of vaccine effectiveness completely changed.
So to summarize: THE NEWS HASNT BEEN TELLING EVERYONE FOR THE PAST YEAR THAT VACCINES COMPLETELY PREVENT THE DISEASE
UPDATE: EFFICACY is a different word than effective.
The vaccines don't reliably prevent spread. That is hardly an extraordinary claim, it's an established scientific fact. Fortunately the vaccines are still very effective at preventing deaths.
Let me get this straight. First, you say the vaccine has been proven to be less than 10% effective. Now you're admitting that you've made it up, while at the same time insisting it's true. Astonishing.
Sorry, I did misremember the exact timing - It was the people from Phase 3, but at the 6-month follow-up: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34525277/ (see Figure 1, 15 dead in control group, 16 dead in vaccine group)
There was another report I remember seeing (but can't find now) that was about this same group that broke it down by cause of death. That one showed a reduction in covid deaths (I think it was like 2 or 3 covid vs 4 covid), with other causes more than making up the difference. But again with such low numbers it doesn't really prove anything, just that I think it's enough to raise questions and definitely doesn't warrant the "safe and effective" mantra.
Source? Would like to read more about this if there's a write up somewhere. My perception was that they were doing was was effective very early on (vaccination drives etc.)
Where can I find a study that supports this: "There was a three or four month window, right when the vaccines were first released, when a 95+% implementation of the initial vaccine shot could have produced a reasonably close facsimile of herd immunity, such that it would have made it several orders more difficult for the virus to effectively mutate. It could have conceivably cut the subsequent death toll in half, if not more.
Unfortunately, politics and antivaxx disinformation got in the way of that. And people continued to die in droves due to selfishness and lies."
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