Vaccine Boosterism

The Dangers of the "Noble Lie"

We are now entering a new phase of the pandemic with the arrival of the initial vaccines. Vaccines that have proven to be quite effective and quite safe.

For much of the pandemic, those trying to minimize the seriousness of the disease, the deniers and the anti-maskers, have relied on lies and fabricated “facts” to push their false-narrative in the face of an ever-increasing death toll.

What we should have learned over the past year is that the best attack against the lies and the denials is clear explanations of the unvarnished truth backed by hard data.

A truth that is not always happy, and not always what people would prefer to be told. And data that is seldom black & white. Part of explaining the science is also not stripping away the nuance and the complexity. Personally, that’s what I’ve tried to do with these articles.

But what never works is fighting the BIG LIE with your own lies and your own fabricated data. That seems obvious, but it’s clearly not a lesson that’s been well learned.

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TL;DR: This is a longer article (~2500 words), but I want to discuss this particular piece of fraudulent vaccine boosterism that’s been making the rounds and why it’s both factually incorrect and meaningless as a piece of data…and how its sole intent is to deceive and not communicate truthful information…

The Vaccine Potential and the Obstacles

Vaccines are a key tool in the fight to bring the epidemic under better control. We are never going back to 2019, that door is forever closed. But we have the chance to craft a more livable 2022 or 2023 ahead of us.

For vaccines to have a chance of creating societal change, we need high levels of vaccine compliance. Likely above 90% for any chance of a return to normal social exchange given the new mutational variants.

But many experts correctly see both the anti-vaxxer movement and the newer anti-vaccine Covid deniers as key obstacles to reaching effective levels of vaccination. With well-funded institutions such as the AEIR and Hoover Institute (who gave us the genocidal policies of Scott Atlas) pushing anti-vaccine messaging.

With the CDC finally able to speak freely, we are beginning to see efforts at countering this anti-vaccine messaging with solid, albeit uninspiring, public health messaging. This is a positive step forward and should have started 10 months ago!

The Vaccine Cheerleaders

But increasingly, there’s a vocal group of “vaccine cheerleaders” amongst journalists, doctors, and even some scientists who have decided that telling lies and fabricating facts is the best way to combat people who…tell lies and fabricate facts!

Over the past couple of weeks, in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as across Twitter and Facebook, we’ve been presented with some of the worst examples of what I’ve come to call “Vaccine Boosterism”.

And this has been abetted by some highly irresponsible corporate PR on the part of several of the vaccine companies, with Johnson & Johnson being the most disreputable.

And as an aside: It’s important to point out that lies can be told even when making “technically true” statements, as any lawyer can tell you.

It’s “technically true” that no one who’s been given a SarsCoV2 vaccine has yet died of Ebola. But a meaningless and irrelevant statement and highly misleading if said in a way to suggest any such protection.

Much of this misleading information, and outright lies, are being echoed on social media by people apparently smart enough to earn an advanced degree, but not smart enough to read the Clinical Study Protocol documents or even do a couple of simple Google searches to confirm their assertions.

What The Vaccines Trials Can Tell Us

It’s a useful exercise to actually read the Clinical Study Protocol documents that were the controlling documents for the vaccine Phase III trials as well as the FDA reports submitted for EUA certification of the vaccines.

The pharmaceutical companies are FAR less likely to play fast and loose with the facts in a legal filing with the FDA than what gets pushed out of the corporate public relations department.

These are not easy documents to read, but anyone with a high school education can grasp 90% of what they say. I will include below links to all of them.

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The results from the vaccine trials have been promising, both in terms of efficacy and safety. But the vaccines DO NOT represent some miracle cure that will roll the clocks back to 2019.

Here is what the trials can tell us:
The vaccines appear to provide a fairly high level of protection for at least up to two months from mild-to-moderate symptomatic disease, though somewhat lower levels of protection for those above 65 years of age. And the vaccines appear to produce no short-term adverse effects within two-weeks of vaccination.

That is ALL the vaccine clinical trials can say with any reasonable certainty! Duration will probably last longer and side-effects will probably remain rare, but those are guesses based on absolutely no data available from the vaccine trials.

The bottom line is this: NO therapeutic has perfect effectiveness…and NO therapeutic is entirely devoid of risk!

These vaccines are one tool in the toolbox to fight the virus. Just like wearing a mask, it has the potential to be an effective tool if widely used, but not a perfect tool.

What The Vaccines Trials CANNOT Tell Us

In the FDA filing documents for EUA certification, certain conclusions were explicitly excluded because the data was simply lacking.

These included:

• Impact of the vaccines on mortality

• Effectiveness of the vaccines to prevent infection

• Effectiveness of the vaccines to prevent hospitalizations

• Duration of vaccine protection beyond 2-months

• Vaccine adverse effects beyond 2 weeks (most vaccines adverse effects appear within 6 weeks)

They explicitly stated that the size of the study population and the duration of the studies, as well as the detailed nature of what was being measured prevented any meaningful statements about either infection or more severe disease leading to hospitalization or death.

To quote directly from the EUA filing Pfizer submitted to the FDA:

Vaccine effectiveness against mortality
“A larger number of individuals at high risk of COVID-19 and higher attack rates would be needed to confirm efficacy of the vaccine against mortality.“

”Benefits in preventing death should be evaluated in large observational studies following authorization.”

Vaccine effectiveness against transmission of SARS-CoV-2
“Data are limited to assess the effect of the vaccine against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from individuals who are infected despite vaccination.“

”Additional evaluations including data from clinical trials and from vaccine use post-authorization will be needed to assess the effect of the vaccine in preventing virus shedding and transmission, in particular in individuals with asymptomatic infection.”

Phase 3 follow-up
"Adverse events considered plausibly linked to vaccination generally start within 6 weeks of vaccine receipt. Therefore, a 2-month follow-up period may allow for identification of potential immune-mediated adverse events that began within 6 weeks of vaccination.”

“From the perspective of vaccine efficacy, it is important to assess whether protection mediated by early responses has not started to wane. A 2-month median follow-up is the shortest follow-up period to achieve some confidence that any protection against COVID-19 is likely to be more than short-lived.”

It’s always useful to see what pharmaceutical companies have to say when submitting legal documents to Federal agencies under felony penalty for perjury!

Vaccine Boosterism

So back to the original graphic. This is one of the more egregious items being pushed by those who seem to think lies are the best tool to fight back against people who lie.

First of all, this graphic is factually incorrect! Secondly, it’s a lie by omission as ongoing data during vaccine deployment directly contradicts the false messaging this graphic is attempting to convey.

There have been both hospitalizations of those vaccinating (both during the trials and post-authorization) and at least two deaths due to adverse reaction to the vaccine, one of which has been fully confirmed.

But even if this was NOT fabricated data and was NOT being used to promulgate a lie, it would still be completely meaningless nonsense data. The size and duration of the vaccine trials meant that any data around the vaccines’ impact on hospitalizations, Covid deaths, or deaths directly from the vaccine could not be statistically distinguished from randomness.

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Here’s an analogy. How can you tell if you’re holding a fair coin? By flipping it. Ok, you flip it and get “heads”. Is it a fair coin? Who knows?

You flip it again and get “heads” again. Is it a fair coin? You have NO idea!

The answer is, you haven’t flipped it enough to tell the difference between completely random events and what you might expect if it were not a fair coin. It takes a LOT more flips of the coin before you can distinguish a pattern from simple randomness.

Clinical study trials are EXACTLY the same…only a lot more complex.

Why ZERO Deaths a Meaningless Number

A bit of math, but easy to follow…

If you pick 1,000 random people who’ve been medically diagnosed with Covid, how many will end up being hospitalized? The answer is about 30 to 50 depending on region.

So another question. By the time the vaccine trials ended, how many of those who had actually gotten the vaccine had been diagnosed with Covid? This is the basis of the efficacy claims and the FDA EUA approvals.

Here’s a rundown:

• Moderna – 11 Cases (94% vaccine efficacy reported)

• Pfizer – 8 Cases (95% vaccine efficacy reported)

• Novavax – 6 Cases (89% vaccine efficacy reported)

• AstraZeneca – 63 Cases (76% vaccine efficacy reported)

Based on those rather low numbers, what’s the likelihood of seeing one or more of those Covid cases hospitalized during the study period based on a 3% hospitalization rate typical for non-vaccinated Covid cases:

• Moderna – 28% chance

• Pfizer – 22% chance (one case requiring hospital treatment, but not full hospitalization)

• Novavax – 17% chance

• AstraZeneca – 85% chance (they had two cases requiring hospital treatment)

And what’s the chance of at least one of those people dying from Covid:

• Moderna – 10% chance

• Pfizer – 8% chance

• Novavax – 6% chance

• AstraZeneca – 47% chance

All well less than the toss of a coin!

By comparison, across all four studies, in the placebo group, there were 553 Covid cases and 5 deaths. Out of 553 Covid cases, there’s a 99.7% chance of at least one death.

Versus out of the 88 Covid cases in the vaccine group, there was only a 58% chance of seeing one death. Not much different than the chance of a coin coming up head on a single toss!

Based on these numbers, it is simply impossible to distinguish randomness from something being caused by the vaccine. It’s like flipping a coin once and then asking if it’s a fair coin…no one can know!

Bottom line: The probability of seeing even a SINGLE hospitalization or much less a SINGLE death in the vaccine arm of any of the trials was quite low.

And this was explicitly stated in the Clinical Study Protocol documents. In fact, the stated expectation for the AstraZeneca trial was it would need to run for 730 days before vaccine impact on mortality could be measured! The trial results were reported out after running only 103 days.

The Noble Lie & Damaged Reputations

At least some of the people pushing this vaccine boosterism consciously KNOW they are pushing lies.

The journalists probably less so, they lack either the education or the minimal level of curiosity to know the difference but are certainly guilty of amplifying the lies. The MD’s promulgating this nonsense are harder to understand. Basically, doctors are not scientists and can’t be expected to be fully versant on any of the underlying science, but should still be capable of doing a Google search and knowing better.

People’s reputations are going to be damaged by pushing these lies and this false-narrative around these vaccines having 100% effectiveness and perfect safety. Neither is true. Plus, these are entirely unnecessary lies…the vaccines are reasonably effective and have proven to be quite safe.

That’s a perfectly acceptable story to tell. The deception and the lying is an arrogant disregard for the truth and an elitist assumption that people are too stupid to know they’re being lied to.

We should have learned the danger of the “Noble Lie” from the early days of the epidemic during the “no one should buy a mask” period in February and March.

Even someone as unimpeachable as Dr. Fauci has seen his reputation shredded by knowingly lying to the American public. And continuing to lie well after it was clear to everyone in virology that airborne aerosol transmission was probably the dominant route of infection.

Even though his motives were honorable in trying to manage access to PPE for medical personnel, the reputational damage has been long-lasting.

Conclusions

Encouraging widespread adoption of the vaccine is critical to bring some control to this epidemic. It will NOT bring about herd immunity and it will NOT return us to the world as it was in 2019. But it will save millions of lives and massively relieve the medical system.

But pushing the lie that this is the single miracle cure that will halt Covid and usher in herd immunity is incredibly dangerous and WILL backfire as we have already seen with masks.

Within the next six months, almost all of us will watch someone in our close circle of friends and family who had gotten the vaccine, go on to catch Covid, and potentially even land in the hospital. The vaccine will be effective, but not perfect.

How many of us know multiple people who came down with the flu after getting the flu shot. Once in widespread usage, these vaccines will look far more like the seasonal influenza vaccines than the measles vaccine. Important for diminishing risk, but not a complete safeguard from either infection or disease.

Managing the virus over the next decade will require an unprecedented amount of public health messaging. We will not get there by telling lies, fabricating “facts”, and engaging in happy-talk.

Uncomfortable truths, based on the best available data and science is the best way to tackle the conspiracy mongers, the grifters, and the charlatans. Reputation matters, it can’t be squandered…

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Reference Links:

• British Medical Journal article:
  Will covid-19 vaccines save lives? Current trials aren’t designed to tell us

• British Medical Journal article:
  Covid-19 vaccine trial protocols released
  

• Moderna Clinical Trial Protocol document:
  https://www.modernatx.com/sites/default/files/mRNA-1273-P301-Protocol.pdf

• Pfizer Clinical Trial Protocol document:
  https://pfe-pfizercom-d8-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/2020-09/C4591001_Clinical_Protocol.pdf

• AstraZeneca Clinical Trial Protocol document:
  https://s3.amazonaws.com/ctr-med-7111/D8110C00001/52bec400-80f6-4c1b-8791-0483923d0867/c8070a4e-6a9d-46f9-8c32-cece903592b9/D8110C00001_CSP-v2.pdf

• Johnson & Johnson Clinical Trial Protocol document:
  https://www.jnj.com/coronavirus/covid-19-phase-3-study-clinical-protocol

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About the author:

I am a scientist with 20+ years in the biotech industry. I currently work as a consultant with companies involved in developing molecular diagnostics platforms, including some of the key testing platforms used to detect the SarsCoV2 virus.

So I bring an insider’s perspective that is scientifically oriented but directed to a general audience trying to make sense of the conflicting stories surrounding the Covid pandemic.

To learn more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dalewharrison/

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