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> So, if the concern is you are upset a miracle vaccine didn't get developed, you're losing my interest quick.

No, the concern is not that a miracle vaccine didn't get developed. The trial measured and reported whether people who got vaccinated got those "few symptoms" vs people who got the placebo. It claimed 95% efficacy in preventing those "few sysmptoms", but it did not do so in reality.

The concern is that the trial results do not agree with reality. That means that something is wrong in either the design or execution of the trial. It's a bug in the trial, and a bug should be debugged.



But it is easy to see that the "few symptoms" in the trial patients easily proxied to "safer outcomes" in the wild? I seriously cannot underline hard enough that folks that didn't get the vaccine put their lives in extreme risk for basically no reason.

Seriously, the numbers were drastic for vaccinated versus not in hospitalizations alone. To push the narrative that they were wrong to get vaccines out just feels misguided.

If you are pushing that we should continue to get better at trials and reporting? I agree with that. Any harder push there, though, feels nitpicking at best, and I don't see the direction you are hoping to go.


I don't think it's a bug in the trial, but rather evolution at work.

The vaccine worked pretty well against the Wuhan strain, but Covid breeds variants like it was a rabbit. The farther from the strain coded into the vaccine the less effective the vaccine is. It still seems to be pretty good at reducing the severity, though--the unvaccinated are dying at a far higher rate than the vaccinated.


> I don't think it's a bug in the trial, but rather evolution at work.

That's called an ad-hoc hypothesis.

In science and philosophy, an ad hoc hypothesis is a hypothesis added to a theory in order to save it from being falsified.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc_hypothesis

It could be true, but it is not enough to assert it, it has to be proven.


Even in the initial data released by the FDA, Pfizer didn't test all patients for COVID during the trial. In fact, they didn't even test all 'suspected' cases during the trial. In fact, there were more 'suspected but not verified' cases among the test group than the control.

It was junk science from top to bottom, and this assumes any science was conducted at all. According to a whistle blower, the science was fraudulent.




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