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.