With the new Sanofi vaccine, there are also concerns that it will simply not be profitable for pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines against a family of rapidly mutating viruses, such as the coronaviruses. — baker
if the effort had not been put in the death toll would likely have been much. much greater by now and into the near future. — Janus
You don't know how great the death toll could be in twenty years; it's pure conjecture. — Janus
If there were no vaccination program much more virulent strains might have emerged. They might anyway. — Janus
I am really struggling to see what your position actually is. Are you against the vaccination program? Do you think there is a viable alternative to it in the situation we find ourselves in? — Janus
So do you have knowledge I'm not privy to? Or is there some other reason why you can say that the death toll would likely have been much much more "into the future", yet I can't possible know what the death toll would be? — Isaac
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. — frank
So do you have knowledge I'm not privy to? Or is there some other reason why you can say that the death toll would likely have been much much more "into the future", yet I can't possible know what the death toll would be? — Isaac
Do you have any evidence at all of this? The prevailing scientific opinion is that the virus will become a flu-like endemic disease. — Isaac
It's not that complicated - vaccination is a small part of a much larger raft of measures which are needed to combat the crisis now and into the future, it's a useful tool, not a panacea. There's absolutely no need to pursue anyone who doesn't want to take the vaccine for any reason (it's just not that important a tool, so long as a good number want it); and focusing all the media attention on anti-vaxxers as being to blame for the continuation of the crisis draws attention away from the huge amount of other actions which are required to protect us now and in the future, but which governments are more reluctant to take given the expense an unpopularity of many of them. — Isaac
all aspects of most high impact, industry-sponsored clinical trials remain influenced by industry and systematically produce more favourable efficacy findings and conclusions than research supported by other sources — Lundh A, Lexchin J, Mintzes B, et al.Industry sponsorship and research outcome. Cochrane Database Syst Rev
85% of vaccine clinical trials are sponsored by vaccine manufacturers and non-industry trials are over four times more likely to report negative or mixed findings than industry-sponsored trials — Manzoli L, Flacco ME, D’Addario M, et al. Non-publication and delayed publication of randomized trials on vaccines: survey. BMJ
the majority of panel members producing clinical practice guidelines have disclosed or undisclosed financial CoI [Conflicts of Interest] — Neuman J, Korenstein D, Ross JS, et al.Prevalence of financial conflicts of interest among panel members producing clinical practice guidelines in Canada and United States: cross sectional study. BMJ
On June 7, the FDA approved aducanumab for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. The drug received accelerated approval because it showed it could reduce the rate of amyloid plaque on scans. What remains uncertain is whether this reduction in plaque means Alzheimer's patients live longer or better lives -- and notably, the totality of the clinical trial data do not show that. Moreover, the drug has various side effects and a whopping price tag: $56,000 a year.
In response to the FDA's approval, three members of the Peripheral and Central Nervous System Drugs Advisory Committee who opposed approval of the drug, quit the panel in protest. Aaron Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, a Harvard professor called the drug "problematic," and argued that there was little evidence it would help patients. Writing in The Atlantic, Nicholas Bagley, JD, and Rachel Sacks, JD, MPH, estimate that if the drug is prescribed to just one-third of eligible patients, it would cost Medicare $112 billion a year -- a massive figure that dwarfs any other medication.
On 28 July 2021, Pfizer and BioNTech posted updated results for their ongoing phase 3 covid-19 vaccine trial. The preprint came almost a year to the day after the historical trial commenced, and nearly four months since the companies announced vaccine efficacy estimates “up to six months.”
measuring vaccine efficacy two months after dosing says little about just how long vaccine-induced immunity will last. “We’re going to be looking very intently at the durability of protection,” Pfizer senior vice president William Gruber, an author on the recent preprint, told the FDA’s advisory committee last December.
But you won’t find 10 month follow-up data here. While the preprint is new, the results it contains aren’t particularly up to date. In fact, the paper is based on the same data cut-off date (13 March 2021) as the 1 April press release, and its topline efficacy result is identical: 91.3% (95% CI 89.0 to 93.2) vaccine efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 through “up to six months of follow-up.”
As an RCT reporting “up to six months of follow-up,” it is notable that evidence of waning immunity was already visible in the data by the 13 March 2021 data cut-off.
“From its peak post-dose 2,” the study authors write, “observed VE [vaccine efficacy] declined.” From 96% to 90% (from two months to <4 months), then to 84% (95% CI 75 to 90) “from four months to the data cut-off,” which, by my calculation (see footnote at the end of the piece), was about one month later.
But although this additional information was available to Pfizer in April, it was not published until the end of July.
The final efficacy timepoint reported in Pfizer’s preprint is “from four months to the data cut-off.” The confidence interval here is wider than earlier time points because only half of trial participants (53%) made it to the four month mark, and mean follow-up is around 4.4 months
Despite the reference to “six month safety and efficacy” in the preprint’s title, the paper only reports on vaccine efficacy “up to six months,” but not from six months. This is not semantics, as it turns out only 7% of trial participants actually reached six months of blinded follow-up (“8% of BNT162b2 recipients and 6% of placebo recipients had ≥6 months follow-up post-dose 2.”) So despite this preprint appearing a year after the trial began, it provides no data on vaccine efficacy past six months, which is the period Israel says vaccine efficacy has dropped to 39%.
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who is on Pfizer’s board [[b]says it all doesn't it? - my addition[/b]], said: “Remember, the original premise behind these vaccines were [sic] that they would substantially reduce the risk of death and severe disease and hospitalization. And that was the data that came out of the initial clinical trials.”
Yet, the trials were not designed to study severe disease. In the data that supported Pfizer’s EUA, the company itself characterized the “severe covid-19” endpoint results as “preliminary evidence.” Hospital admission numbers were not reported, and zero covid-19 deaths occurred.
In the preprint, high efficacy against “severe covid-19” is reported based on all follow-up time (one event in the vaccinated group vs 30 in placebo), but the number of hospital admissions is not reported so we don’t know which, if any, of these patients were ill enough to require hospital treatment. (In Moderna’s trial, data last year showed that 21 of 30 “severe covid-19” cases were not admitted to hospital; Table S14).
on preventing death from covid-19, there are too few data to draw conclusions—a total of three covid-19 related deaths (one on vaccine, two on placebo). There were 29 total deaths during blinded follow-up (15 in the vaccine arm; 14 in placebo).
“GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients,” the analyst wrote. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”
the number of children on medication for ADHD has grown to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A diagnosis is now found in 15 percent of high-school age children when, in fact, the true rate is closer to 5 percent, with only a small minority of that group truly needing to be medicated.
This gross over-diagnosis and prescription is a direct result of intense, multi-million dollar marketing campaigns by the drug makers, both through celebrity endorsements as well print and television ads that prompt patients and their families to ask doctors about those specific drugs. The result is to sway doctors to go for the easy, quick fix solution of a pill (when you have a hammer, everything you see is a nail). And the tactic has paid off, with a quintupling of stimulant sales since 2002, to over $8 billion in revenues.
The practice has created a situation of widespread drug abuse, affecting the long-term health and well-being of millions of young people. This mess has prompted long-time ADHD advocate Dr. Keith Conners to call the rising diagnosis rates a “concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels,” that has resulted in “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.” — New York Times - The Rise in Ritalin
And I said you couldn't possibly know what the death toll would have been or will be twenty years into the future. But you ignored those qualifications regarding the future. — Janus
Do you have any papers to cite in support of that claim? That may indeed be the more likely scenario, but who knows? Even the experts can't predict the future with certainty. — Janus
Other social issues should be addressed of course, but the emergency now is the fight against covid. — Janus
I think you are going against the grain of expert opinion if you think that vaccination is a "small part". The consensus seems to be that without vaccines we might never get out of the next wave/ lockdown cycle — Janus
You still haven't given your reasons for not wanting the vaccine. Do you have a rational reason or are you simply afraid of it? — Janus
I don't see any moral imperative for me to take a vaccine since the outcome of my doing so is very unlikely to reduce harm relative to my not doing so. I'm very unlikely to need hospital treatment if I do get it, I'm very unlikely (given my hygiene measures) to pass the disease on (and the vaccine is only marginal in reducing transmission anyway), and there's little to no evidence that mass vaccination will do any more to stop the virus long term than naturally acquired immunity. — Isaac
If you were vaccinated you would be even less likely to get infected and transmit the virus. — Janus
You haven't given any good reason why you shouldn't be vaccinated, and nor have you explained why you don't want to be vaccinated. — Janus
I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry and I don't agree that giving vaccines to healthy people who have little chance of contracting the severe disease is a good use of limited resources. — Isaac
I can’t see anything like that for choosing to not be vaccinated. — Michael
I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry and I don't agree that giving vaccines to healthy people who have little chance of contracting the severe disease is a good use of limited resources. — Isaac
Getting vaccinated is such a minor inconvenience that requires no lifestyle changes — Michael
I don't trust the pharmaceutical industry — Isaac
I don't agree that giving vaccines to healthy people who have little chance of contracting the severe disease is a good use of limited resources. — Isaac
It’s good to see labour in Australia is finding its teeth again. — NOS4A2
So you believe that the vaccine is either more dangerous than the disease or ineffective? It’s neither. So this reasoning is fallacious. — Michael
There’s enough to go around. I don’t know about wherever you live but the UK has ordered enough for every adult, and presumably some children too. — Michael
Hardly. Some union members were protesting their own union while shit-talking the Labour government. So much for labour. — NOS4A2
If you answer here is any different to taking the vaccine, what do you think is different about the situation? — Isaac
The fact that the companies aren’t trying to cover up their own fuckup. — Michael
The fact that since the introduction of the vaccines the number of deaths, serious symptoms, and cases has dropped. — Michael
The fact that there have been very few negative reactions to the vaccines. — Michael
Just by way of checking how far you normally take this attitude... — Isaac
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