7 December 2020
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a constant repetition, by public health officials, politicians, and even the odd billionaire anti-trust-violator-turned-philanthrocapitalist, of the mantra that an effective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus associated with COVID-19) is the only way out of the social and economic destruction that has been wrought upon the world.
(This destruction, it must be stressed, has been caused by the reaction to the virus, and not by the virus itself, which, in stark contrast to previous pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish Flu, disproportionately kills people with limited life expectancy due to advanced age and/or serious underlying medical conditions, while mercifully sparing children, who have a higher risk of dying from seasonal influenza than from COVID-19.)
It is unclear why the development of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 has been prioritised over identifying effective treatments for COVID-19. After all, up to 80% of people who contract the virus never develop any symptoms of infection, and these so-called ‘asymptomatic carriers’ do not transmit the virus to anyone else; they’re simply people with a competent immune system which rapidly dispatches the virus before it can do any damage to them.
Surely it would be far more cost-effective, and definitely safer, to focus on effectively treating the small minority of people who actually become ill after being infected with the virus, than on vaccinating the entire population with rushed-to-market vaccines? Especially vaccines produced by companies that have a track record of “illegal activities, such as providing kickbacks and bribes, knowingly shipping adulterated or contaminated drugs to pharmacies, and marketing drugs for unapproved uses”.
The argument for population-wide vaccination rests on the premise of vaccine-induced herd immunity: If the vast majority of people become immune to the virus by being vaccinated against it, its chain of transmission will be broken. Since viruses are non-living and can only replicate themselves inside the cells of living hosts, once there are insufficient susceptible people to infect, the virus will eventually disappear from the population.
Those who are unable to receive the vaccine on medical grounds, or whose immune systems fail to mount an appropriate response to the vaccine, will be protected by vaccine-induced ‘herd immunity’.
However, for herd immunity to develop, the vaccine must prevent transmission of the infectious agent.
Can we expect SARS-CoV-2 vaccines to induce herd immunity? According to the associate editor of the British Medical Journal, Peter Doshi, we can’t.
Doshi quoted Tal Zaks, chief medical officer at Moderna – the company which recently trumpeted a nearly 95% ‘effectiveness’ rate for its SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate – as saying:
“Our trial will not demonstrate prevention of transmission.”
Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
As Doshi’s summary of the trial protocols for all the major SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates clearly shows, the omission of this crucial endpoint in gauging vaccine effectiveness is not unique to Moderna’s product. None of the vaccines are being tested for efficacy in preventing transmission of SARS-CoV-2:
So if the much-touted 95% effectiveness rate of Moderna’s vaccine, or the equally enthusiastically lauded 90% effectiveness rate of Pfizer’s candidate, doesn’t refer to prevention of transmission of the virus, what does it refer to?
To be capable of ‘ending the pandemic’, surely a vaccine would need to be able to meaningfully reduce the risk of people becoming seriously ill, being hospitalised, or dying. You would think so, wouldn’t you? BMJ‘s Peter Doshi certainly did. But nope. None of the vaccines are being tested to see if they achieve any of those important end-points:
So what exactly do these claims of 90-95% effectiveness mean? As Peter Doshi explains,
“In all the ongoing phase III trials for which details have been released, laboratory confirmed infections even with only mild symptoms qualify as meeting the primary endpoint definition. In Pfizer and Moderna’s trials, for example, people with only a cough and positive laboratory test would bring those trials one event closer to their completion. (If AstraZeneca’s ongoing UK trial is designed similarly to its ‘paused’ US trial for which the company has released details, a cough and fever with positive PCR test would suffice.)”
Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us
In other words, to be approved for use and unleashed on the public (and made, in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s words, “as mandatory as you can possibly make it“), vaccine manufacturers need only demonstrate that their products reduce the occurrence of mild cold symptoms, along with a ‘positive result’ on a test that has been declared by the Portuguese Court of Appeal to be unfit for purpose in diagnosing infectious illness.
And don’t forget that up to 80% of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 don’t develop symptoms anyway.
But it gets even worse. As Dr William Haseltine, former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, has pointed out, even these lukewarm results are based on ‘interim analyses’ which involved as few as 32 vaccine recipients, in the case of Pfizer’s candidate:
“For Moderna, the initial interim analysis will be based on the results of infection of only 53 people. The judgment reached in interim analysis is dependent upon the difference in the number of people with symptoms, which may be mild, in the vaccinated group versus the unvaccinated group.
Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed
Moderna’s success margin is for 13 or less of those 53 to develop symptoms compared to 40 or more in their control group. For Johnson & Johnson, their interim analysis includes 77 vaccine recipients, with a success margin of 18 or less developing symptoms compared to 59 in the control group. For AstraZeneca, their interim analysis includes 50 vaccine recipients, with a success margin of 12 or less developing symptoms compared to 19 in the 25 person control group. Pfizer is even smaller in its success requirements. Their initial group includes 32 vaccine recipients, with a success margin of 7 or less developing symptoms compared to 25 in the control group.”
Dr Haseltine summarises the farce being played out before our eyes with devastating clarity:
“These protocols do not emphasize the most important ramifications of Covid-19 that people are most interested in preventing: overall infection, hospitalization, and death. It boggles the mind and defies common sense that the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the rest would consider the approval of a vaccine that would be distributed to hundreds of millions on such slender threads of success.”
Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed
The Australian Government has invested $363 million to support research and development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines and committed over $3.3 billion in 5 agreements with vaccine manufacturers, to obtain vaccines that, in Dr Heseltine’s words, “prevent common cold symptoms“.
And meanwhile, the mainstream media obediently parrot the ridiculous canard that anyone who raises valid questions about the wisdom of rolling out vaccines that have been developed at ‘warp speed’ to entire populations (including subgroups that have not been included in clinical trials, such as pregnant women and elderly people with comorbidities), is an ‘antivaxxer‘ – as opposed to a person capable of critical thinking.
By those standards, I guess Peter Doshi, associate editor of the British Medical Journal, and William Haseltine, former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, must be ‘antivaxxers’ too.
Or perhaps they simply possess a combination of factors that seems to be lacking in both politicians and public health officials in our present Alice in COVID-Land dystopia: functioning brain cells, plus integrity.
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