COVID Vaccine Weirdness

Something weird is going on.

The main stream media is saying that the COVID vaccines:

Prevent serious illness.
Prevent hospitalizations.
Prevent deaths.
Reduce transmission.

These are all false statements. As you can see in the table below, the endpoints of the trials, that is, what the trials were designed to detect, were MILD SYMPTOMS. When they say that a vaccine is 95% effective, that means that the vaccine was 95% effective at preventing MILD SYMPTOMS. That’s all anyone can tell from these trials. And the trials are all we have. You can still get infected, you can still transmit that infection, you can still have a serious illness, you can still end up in the hospital, you can still die. No one knows if the vaccine prevents any of those things. What we KNOW is that your symptom of COUGH is less.

The weird thing that is happening is that these false statements are not being flagged as false!

Covid-19 Vaccine Trial Protocols Released, BMJ, 21 October 2020

Contrary to prevailing assumptions (including those of a former Food and Drug Administration commissioner), none of the vaccine trials are designed to detect a significant reduction in hospital admissions, admission to intensive care, or death. Rather than studying severe disease, these mega-trials all set a primary endpoint of symptomatic covid-19 of essentially any severity: a laboratory positive result plus mild symptoms such as cough and fever count as outcome events.

Here’s an example of something in main stream media (Washington Post) that is false:

I’m optimistic that this can happen because of a specific result in the vaccine trials that, so far, has received little attention. Much has been made of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines being 95 percent efficacious in preventing symptomatic illness. [This is a true statement.] That’s a terrific result, but it’s not the most important one. I’m not so impressed if a vaccine can prevent someone from developing a sore throat or runny nose. I care about whether vaccination means that people won’t become severely ill — to the point that they require hospitalization.

On this front, outcomes from the Pfizer and Moderna trials are extraordinary. … I cannot overemphasize this result: Out of more than 30,000 people who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, only one person became ill enough to be hospitalized. … This is the end point we should be scrutinizing with other vaccine candidates. [These are false statements. Hospitalization was never an endpoint.]

The fact that there were few hospitalizations in the trials reflects the trials’ designs … they were too small, too short, and did not enlist the very populations that WOULD end up hospitalized, namely older people, sick people, frail people.

Note the “N” in the bottom rows of these charts:

Table 1. Characteristics of ongoing phase III covid-19 vaccine trials