Product manufacturer recommends use of its product. Surprise!
Should they not run this type of experiment and make a useful and true recommendation to the public? Would that be a better more pure scenario for you?
They are not giving advice or recommendations, they are reporting the results of a study.
That's the beauty of a good scientific study: you do not have to trust the author. In fact don't, the more people try to find errors the better.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/07/05/time-to-assume-that-hea...
I think people are "acting like" it's scientific data about a vaccine of interest to the public.
Are you suggesting the data is unreliable or falsified? If so, and you have a basis for that, please cite.
Otherwise, it's difficult to understand why you're implying people shouldn't be interested in this information.
Why should they lie? If their data had something different to their press release, lying and then getting caught (e.g. by a whistleblower) would damage their reputation. If their data shows it's bad, as responsible scientists why shouldn't they come out with the truth to protect the general public, and say "We'll continue work on the Omicron-specific vaccine.".
Unless you think their main motive is to boost their stock price in the short term. That kind of thinking should be reserved for people dealing with the blockhain-ponzi schemes.
Not to say they did commit any such errors here. Perhaps all such studies conducted by Pfizer are truly earnest and valid/replicable, I certainly hope they are. But it's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of an organization publishing new science when that organization stands to profit greatly from the results. You may call that libertarian (though I'm frankly not sure how), I'd call it just due diligence.
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/industries/summ...
[2] https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/bigpharma
[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2021/04/06/meet-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical...
Phizer holds single largest criminal fine in human history at 1.3$ Billion USD (to my knowledge). They have many reasons to lie; while I'm not suggesting they are (I have no idea how I would determine truth from falsehood in the realm of scientific information) it's quite ignorant to make the statement "Why would they lie". They would lie because it's something innate to humans and Phizer is no exception. They stand to make ludicrous amounts of money if boosters become mandated - now boosters may ultimately be the best option for the protection of human life! But this doesn't mean we shouldn't be incredibly skeptical of every word that comes from this organization.
While I am fully vaccinated (ironically with 2x Phizer), I am and will remain hesitant at accepting information provided by pharmaceutical companies at face value until the day I'm dead.
Whether or not that's better off for the person on the receiving end is often entirely orthogonal to the entire arrangement.
See: The Tobacco Industry The Dairy Industry pre-FDA The Sugar Industry The Media Industry Some corners of the Supplement industry
Also see: Lobbying and Psychological anchoring
You, in fact, picked the absolute group of people to prove the virtue of taking someone at their word. Go look for the old Thalidomide adverts, then go read the rest of the history of it.
Point being: always consider the source, and incentives. There is always an angle.
We have (some) laws regulating what advertisers can say. Putting out a press releases like this is, in effect, an advertisement. It sways public opinion and will effect their profits.
And did you know the US is the only country where it is legal for pharmaceutical companies to advertise their medications to the public?
And did you know the pharmaceutical companies are the main source of revenue for the FDA, the agency that approves their drugs?
Why not? Stock picking is their job. Given that logic, a teacher shouldn't tell people how to teach their kid to read, and a plumber shouldn't tell people how to change a faucet.
Yes, that's technically fraud/market manipulation. That@s why most hedge fund managers won@t give financial advice until after they've been paid, and are, at best, either selling the money management angle with all the right regulatory and compliance check marks ticked, or they're selling you fast access to market actors + quantitative fiscal analysis results.
Either way, I wouldn't advise necessarily blindly taking one's advice. Just because you "do it as your job" doesn't mean you're necessarily terribly good at it. Never mind the whole "completely punting on your own responsibility as a capital allocator" thing.
Remember, everybody punting to hedge funds and such is the reason the economy overtime has trended toward centralization. Once everybody knows the guy managing everyone else's money, it's only a matter of time til the information engineering starts.
The hedge fund manager has access to billions in managed capital. If he can advertise positions to the public, and the public takes his advice; he can manipulate his billions of dollars vs the known positions he gives out to hedge his own positions.
This is a 5 years olds description of how this works.
Very disappointed.
Are you really sure they would have published anything if it had proven negative? A rhetorical question, of course.
There's some things called business incentives and conflicts of interest in the world.
Most people have accepted COVID is here permanently. We're at ~50% vaccination and most vaccinated people I know says they won't get a booster because "it was supposed to make things go back to normal the first time."
Apathy is set in hard, and control of the message is outside the hands of the government and media here. Delta scared people a bunch, but after about a month, most people reverted back to not caring. I don't know anyone who is talking about Omicron, so I think every additional event just numbs more people.
Given that we've learned a lot, tactics and strategies have evolved, and therapeutics are getting better, death rate should continue to go down.
That's why many places in the US feel somewhat back to normal.
These countries need to lead the way to accepting we've waited for vaccines & prophylactics so that we have tools to use to combat this but there is now a heightened risk that we have to live with and make reasonable mitigations against.
Vaccines don't really stop the spread of the virus, neither do they stop you from getting infected, they just reduce the symptoms and the odds of death. Which is still great, but it's not stopping the virus.
We need next level meds, real vaccines.
Technically correct, they don't stop the spread, but they significantly reduce it.
It's kinda logical, isn't it? The virus must win over your antibodies to replicate. Currently breakthrough infections happen 1-2% of the time in the vaccinated, so even if there are 10x as many asymptomatic, unreported cases, the protective effect is still huge. This is really important to keep R < 1, which effectively means "stopping the virus". Eventually.
In addition, the 90% reduced chance of hospitalisation is of great help to the healthcare system.
Besides, restrictions have an exponential effect (by reducing the R value) whilst mitigations only have a linear effect. That makes it hard to replace one with the other. Instead I think earlier, less stringent, restrictions to start damping the wave early, combined with as much mitigation as possible are probably the right solution.
Every wave, its a new game of 'flatten the curve'. And really that is what we need.
If you look at the broad scale of human history, though, there have been hundreds of epidemics, and we got past them.
I suspect there's an end to be had via broad-based immunity to the most transmissive mutations evolution's random walk can come up with before it hits a local maxima.
Where I live, in Alberta, we had a really bad 4th wave in September/October. Prior to that we were at ~75% vaccination rate in those over 18. The wave almost killed our healthcare system and it was primarily unvaccinated individuals using the beds. Had we been at 100% vaccination rate, we most definitely wouldn't have been in the same position.
Beyond that, a lockdown is not the only non-pharmaceutical intervention that's available to us. It's just that many governments have failed to use other tools at the right time and in a way that's actually effective, often only implementing them right before the peak of a wave when it's way too late.
Like the time they were handed the largest criminal fine and the largest healthcare fraud judgment in history. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
There are also smaller cases as well.
I haven't seen that with green powder yet.
Even if we were to attribute malice to Pfizer's leadership, that's malice on a scale the world rarely sees.