Super appreciate your post and ask for debate. Particularly this sentence:
"I detest the conspirator theorists and bullies from the anti-vax brigade but equally, I detest the bullying from governments, forcing people into making the decisions they want them to."
I'm with you in that people should be free to decide - and exposed to information in both directions. Informed consent is a big deal, and there's not much opportunity for it in the public. I think civil debate (like you propose here) is the way to go. Now for perspective:
I think about this like sports (oversimplified) but when you have a GM or coach of a team who has a losing record, you fire him and change up the game plan. With COVID, no matter what the outcomes (distancing, masks, vaccine, vaccine II etc.) the 'solution' is always more government, less choice. Put aside vaccine efficacy, from a background perspective, this is not an even playing field and has never been. Our government projected a whole bunch that just never panned out:
- Mortality rates were wrong
- Death counts were wrong
- Rules were changed to count 'death' uniquely for covid
- The most at risk (here in the USA nursing home average life span is about 6 months, brittle population to say the least) were exposed directly to the most infected
- No hospitals were overrun (in the USA), see the boat and park they made in NYC that was largely empty and left a few weeks after it arrived
So before we get to the vaccine, we've got a lot of really disingenuous people calling the shots, and not taking the blame for bad decisions that did cost lives. Those same people are leading the vaccine charge - and were against it until Trump lost generally. So politically it looks messy.
Now for data:
Pfizer's phase III trial results are here: trial results if you read it, 21720 vaccinated, 21728 in the placebo group. A randomized control test is the way to go. 8 cases amongst vaccinated, 162 amongst placebo. Yes, it's true that 8 is 95% better than 162 - which has been the title and justification for vaccination. But 162/21728 is 0.74%.
That means that of the placebo group, 99.3% didn't get COVID. Of the vaccinated 99.8% didn't get it.
Coming back to efficacy, 0.5% lift in a study that small is not statistically significant. I'm not saying the vaccine doesn't work, there's plenty of data out there that suggests it does something. The point is: if we're trying to save a life - why wouldn't we tell people that doing nothing gets you 99% of the way there?
If life-saving were the goal:
- We would never mandate something that wasn't free - do you think Pfizer would produce and push vaccines if it wasn't such a moneymaker?
- We would offer a choice: the options are two of basically the same vaccine, no mention of HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, vitamin d, zinc. If those have been proven to save lives, and are demonstrably safer than the vaccine, why no mention of them?
- We wouldn't pay hospitals based on covid deaths
- We wouldn't silence doctors with opposing views
If you look at this from a business perspective, a day after FDA approval the Pfizer CEO announced the vaccine won't be effective against the delta variant. In the USA we don't have PCR tests developed to detect the delta variant, it's done in a centralized lab that's estimating cases based on a % of samples it sees. If delta's that scary, why not make a test for it before we start crediting it for all our mitigation efforts not working? Convenient scapegoat eh?
This hasn't been an above-board approach. Again the vaccines could be incredible, from the numbers I've seen, potentially an upside of 60-70% protection in most cases (see Israel, and NYC, double-digit percentages hospitalized are vaccinated). But this feels a lot more like a push for power and money than something genuinely meant to help people.
So again, skeptical because the people behind it have been wrong at every turn, and don't have a decent track record of being honest with the data.
Most strikingly, ZERO discussion of natural immunity. Studies out of Israel suggest it's 10-12x more effective than the vaccine. But serious question marks: if the goal is to save lives, and we've got a 4 billion-year-old immune system that works pretty well - how are we suddenly all incapable of surviving this thing without Pfizer? If it's because this is a Chinese bioweapon that does scary stuff to us and only Pfizer can counter say that publically, and go after China. But we haven't doing that so I don't think it is. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be about saving lives.
I tend to think that those in government take a "don't let a good crisis go to waste" attitude in their decision making vs. some mass conspiracy to do something nefarious. I don't give them that much credit. Having said that, I think the threat from covid is real (but that doesn't mean it needs to be exaggerated) and that vaccines are generally quite effective. In Florida, where the percent of people vaccinated is hovering somewhere around 60% last I checked, hospitalizations are ~90% unvaccinated. That says to me that the vaccines probably offer significant protection. If 100% of people were vaccinated then 100% of hospitalizations would be among the vaccinated but there would in theory be fewer hospitalizations overall. It makes sense that if you are in an area that is highly vaccinated that at some point most hospitalizations would be among the vaccinated. You have to take into account the trend of total hospitalizations due to COVID as well.
And yes, there has been very little discussion of natural immunity or herd immunity (at least in a positive context) but i think this is out of fear. It really doesn't take a whole lot to overwhelm hospitals. They operate close to capacity in the best of times for cost reasons. Even if COVID only hospitalizes a fraction of a percent of the population, it can push things over the edge. Natural immunity is great (and better than a vaccine) but the government doesn't want people having "COVID parties" to get infected, and for good reason. While we have not, generally speaking, had hospitals overrun up until this point, there have been many that were very close to capacity and in many cases things like "elective" surgeries have been delayed which in itself is deadly to some.
As far as the delta variant, certain vaccines may be more effective than others but even the ones that are being labeled as potentially not effective are really just less effective, not completely ineffective. I read somewhere that the J&J vaccine may be better than the others vs. the delta variant.
As far as the Pfizer trial mentioned above, the fact of the matter is that, given enough time, everybody will eventually get COVID unless we can magically eradicate it just as everybody at some point gets the flu. The vaccine offers protection in addition to just prevention. It tends to make symptoms significantly less severe if you do contract COVID and reduces the chance of hospitalization or death. The flu vaccine does the same thing for the flu. It doesn't always prevent it, but if it doesn't, it usually makes symptoms less severe.
As far as HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, vitamin d, zinc, etc., are there good randomized control studies based on these vs. COVID?
What I don't understand is the hype about masks. They CAN be effective but to be effective you have to use something better than the disposable paper masks or cloth coverings that people typically use. Plus you have to be diligent about their usage, wearing them correctly, making sure not to touch your face, washing your hands frequently, not reusing the mask, being careful when you take it off, etc. In other words, the way people typically use them on average, they are completely ineffective (I find it hysterical when I see idiots wearing a mask but not covering their nose...or constantly pulling it up and down...maybe hysterical isn't the right word).
At the end of the day, most of what we hear about COVID comes from politicians. They say whatever they think will most help themselves...or protect themselves from blame later. But that doesn't change the actual science and just because a politician says or does something stupid regarding a vaccine doesn't mean the vaccine is bad. It just means they are.
Super grateful for your clarity and the depth of this response. There's a ton here.
First - I 100% agree on politicians and the motive there. Generally, that sounds reasonable - until you start digging a little deeper. I work at a data integration company, most of what we do is validate information before pulling it together and marrying it to disparate data sets. So a lot goes into understanding where the data comes from. Just like the "with covid" vs. "of covid" loophole is exploited to exaggerate death counts, hospitals are told not to ask patients with symptoms if they've been vaccinated. They're also only counting you as vaccinated if you've had both shots for >2 weeks. As of this morning, Israel counts you as unvaccinated if you haven't yet had your 3rd shot. So "vaccinated" is a very narrow definition, convenient for making rosy comparisons of a poorly tested treatment. In data science, we call that a segment.
When more effort is placed on changing the definition of something than changing the something, it's usually because the underlying something doesn't show what we want it to: in this case high vaccine efficacy. You'll start hearing that the vast majority of patients in the UK and Israel are vaccinated soon - Delta will be the culprit - as opposed to a poorly run trial with data that scientifically showed a 0.5% absolute benefit vs. doing nothing.
What strikes me as nefarious is that most vaccines are pulled when more than 50-100 people die in close proximity to them. We're in the tens of thousands globally and there's no discussion of it. Even when it happens in the public sphere: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-tyne-58330796.amp.
Full disclosure: I totally believe COVID is real and dangerous. I had it, paralyzed half my face for a month (bell's palsy) and I spend about 7hrs a week in the gym (34 y/o). No comorbidities or sickness here, it was awful - way worse than any flu I've gotten. That's why I've been doing so much reading. The second I found out that Gates was refusing to allow other countries to manufacture in their facilities (Canada, for example) or that 10x as many died of starvation because of lockdown in India vs. of COVID this I got really curious. Net lives saved are severely in the red.
Just starting now to discuss - here with you. So grateful for anything you can expose me to that I might have missed. I'll forward some studies on
Thank you!
Sources
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8088823/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8101859/
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20210830/Does-SARS-CoV-2-natural-infection-immunity-better-protect-against-the-Delta-variant-than-vaccination.aspx
RCT on Masks: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33205991/ inconclusive, but begs the question - why haven't we done one that IS conclusive yet - when we continue to use this as a primary method of mitigation?
Wow...where to start. Thanks I guess!
Starting at the bottom, I really don't go for the Chinese bioweapon debate. I go with the bats. Similar and worse virus' have been found here in Thailand from bat excrement and considering the Chinese will eat anything...I also read that it is quite feasible that the virus actually started in Thailand, we could have half the population dying of bubonic plague and the govt. wouldn't notice. To add to the evidence, Thailand was the first country outside China to record a case.
I actually live 3km from Don Mueang airport where in January 2020 over 400,000 Chinese tourists had arrived and scattered themselves all over the country on holiday. Yet we never saw huge numbers of cases until Delta hit us earlier this year. I have always found this very odd, even taking into account the Thai's 'no test, no find' policy of burying their head in the sand.
As for the business point of view. It's difficult to comment as I see everything from a UK, social based healthcare system perspective. In many debates about healthcare and 'Big Pharma' I find the discussion gets skewed by a US, private healthcare context being applied. Research costs an awful lot of money with no guarantee of payback and so for a private company, its great risk. If governments funded educational establishments better and ran competent social healthcare systems, I believe, with the aid of charitably funded research, the whole healthcare and drug research system would be much more efficient and effective. Something useful governments could do with all its taxes. How much research could be done for the cost of an F35 jet at 108m USD a pop?
But the core we are discussing is vaccine efficiency and so the numbers and research you have kindly furnished me with I will look further into and come back to you. Usual problem is the quatity of data available to all of us in the internet age, its so difficult not to subconsciously pick and choose what we want to examine or not, thus making these sort of debates invaluable as they prompt us to look in different directions than perhaps we normally would!
Thank you again.
This dialogue is a huge breath of fresh air!
Eager to hear your thoughts on vaccine efficacy. I read the US FDA approval this week, and it cites the same 170 case phase III trial from December 10th. No statistical significance which is shocking because hundreds of millions have the vaccine now, why not use real-world data? It's like the mask debate: it should be super easy to prove efficacy with 3 1/2 billion people following along. That's more than enough sample size to clearly demonstrate efficacy. However, for some reason, our global governments continue to use studies of plastic dummies in air-sealed labs instead.
The other end is the lack of discussion of alternatives and risks. I've read some really scary things on the bacteria/virus that fester inside of a cloth mask after just an hour or two. Several have been shown to cause disease with a higher fatality rate than covid by a significant multiple (Streptococcus). This seems counterproductive - again maybe there are tests that prove it's a non-issue, but more discussion would help. Continuing to use studies with absurd controls that don't apply to the real world makes nerds like me suspicious.