COVID-19 vaccines — a representative example of dangerous ignorance

30 November 2020

Ignorance kills?

This showed up today from British science writer, Rob Lyons:

There is no doubt that vaccination is one of the greatest achievements of modern medicine, saving countless lives and avoiding a huge amount of suffering.

Those who want to spread fears about vaccinations are likely to do far more harm than good, and their arguments should be countered relentlessly.

Nonetheless, it seems clear that the government should be honest that there is a vanishingly small risk of such side effects with vaccination, and work swiftly to make sure that those who suffer them don't also suffer from financial hardship.

"Vanishingly small risk"?

That's a foolishly premature (and potentially dangerous) judgment.

It does not even qualify as guesswork, in that none of the vaccine trials have released complete preliminary test results, or the specific data that those conclusions are based upon.

Estimating risk, especially for never-before mass-administered mRNA vaccines — on the basis of the little evidence that we have so far — is medically insane.

Contrast — two arguably more sensible perspectives

One comes from The BMJ.

The other from the UK Medical Freedom Alliance.

I give each a section below.

The BMJ opinion

A recent BMJ editorial discussed how quantitatively inadequately set up, the West's COVID vaccine trials have been:

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things . . . first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either . . . .

None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths.

Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

Part of the reason may be numbers.

Severe illness requiring hospital admission, which happens in only a small fraction of symptomatic covid-19 cases, would be unlikely to occur in significant numbers in trials.

Because most people with symptomatic covid-19 experience only mild symptoms, even trials involving 30 000 or more patients would turn up relatively few cases of severe disease.

Hospital admissions and deaths from covid-19 are simply too uncommon in the population being studied for an effective vaccine to demonstrate statistically significant differences in a trial of 30 000 people.

The same is true of its ability to save lives or prevent transmission: the trials are not designed to find out.

Notice that these trial characteristics mean that COVID "vaccines" can be approved (and presumably marketed) without any of them doing anything even marginally useful.

The (perhaps controversial) UK Medical Freedom Alliance's perspective

Implicitly joining The BMJ's stated caveat, an "open letter" from the United Kingdom's Medical Freedom Alliance highlights the risks that rushed COVID vaccine trials — combined with COVID hysteria — pose the public.

The letter comes from "medical practitioners, scientists, academics and lawyers" and is addressed to pertinent United Kingdom medical authorities:

UK Medical Freedom Alliance, Open Letter: Advertisement, Offer and Administration of Vaccines for COVID-19 in the UK, worlddoctorsalliance.com (23 November 2020)

I will not quote from this letter's 14 pages. Excerpting would detract from its authors' issue by issue approach to the following subjects:

"Over-Estimation of the Public Health Risk from SARS-CoV-2"

"Inadequate Assessment of the Public Health Risk from a Covid Vaccine"

"Medical Freedom and Informed Consent"

"Media Claims and Misinformation"

In sum

The Medical Freedom Alliance concludes (reasonably I think) that:

COVID risks are overestimated for most of the population

and, as yet

risks from still-testing SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are potentially underestimated.

The letter's authors conclude that, at the very least, people need a clearer picture of what they might gain or lose by being COVID-vaccinated under current circumstances.

The moral? — Follow the money

What is already noticeable is the Establishment's attempt to brand rushed COVID vaccine-skeptical folk as blanket anti-vaxxers.

There is, one would think, an obvious difference between being skeptical of something not at all proven — and being unscientifically suspicious of something long-demonstrated to be statistically safe.

PeteFree.com

COVID-19 vaccines — a representative example of dangerous ignorance