> Were they effective?
They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness.
They absolutely are effective at reducing the risk of death or serious illness.
Actually, possibly not :( This breaks down into two separate questions:
1. Are they effective at reducing risk of death / serious illness now.
2. Were they so in the past?
To answer these we can't rely on any scientific gold standards despite the importance of the questions, because the trials showed no impact on death or actually the Pfizer trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group (due to extra heart attacks). This was written off as "not statistically significant" (this isn't the right way to use statistical significance as a concept). Then they vaccinated the control group, thus ending the RCT phase of data collection.
The problem was that despite the constant messaging, COVID is virtually never deadly outside of the very elderly or sick, and those people tend not to join drug trials. Thus despite having ~65,000-ish participants there were not enough COVID deaths to detect any impact on this metric. Hospitalization meanwhile and "severe illness" were likewise not trial endpoints. So only noisy observational data is available.
For (1) the data from countries that actually release the raw data shows very mixed results indeed, with deaths being higher amongst the vaccinated cohort for some dosing ranges and age groups, lower for others, and overall there is no clear message from the data that vaccines are reducing deaths.
https://bartram.substack.com/p/update-on-the-failure-of-the-...
"It appears that things have got somewhat worse since last week’s report, with the hospitalisation and death rates in the double vaccinated (not boosted) exceeding that seen in the unvaccinated for all aged over 70, and with a higher death rate in those aged over 60 as well. What’s more, there now appears to be practically no benefit of vaccination with two doses of vaccine for those aged under 60, in terms of the remaining protection against hospitalisation and death."
That's for the UK but similar numbers can be found elsewhere in the rare cases where governments actually release the actual data (normally, they hide the actual numbers). Also, what we actually care about is overall mortality because vaccines can and do kill people, and just changing the cause of death isn't very useful. There too the news is disappointing, with small increases in excess death being correlated with booster rollouts but not the winter Omicron wave:
https://bartram.substack.com/p/increased-deaths-in-england-f...
All this is official UK government data so enough reason to at minimum reserve judgement. Data in the past is unfortunately heavily corrupted by mis-allocation of people to the different status buckets. The methodology they use would calculate a big but transient impact on death and sickness from an injection of water.
No, I grant you. Some of us have seen it. Although, there is a complication (in the anecdotals I can provide, that suffice to falsify a proposed rule) in determining whether bad treatments may have been the killers.
If that «virtually» means "following some statistics", than those statistics must be judged as quite blurry by our experience: they conceal what we have seen.
As for "virtually never", why would you think "never with exceptions" is the definition? "Virtually never" here just means "it happens very rarely relative to the total number of COVID deaths". Isn't that normal use of English? We're not communicating in SAT here.
I agree that the statistics are blurry, but they're mostly blurred in the direction of exaggerating the risks. I'll take your word for it that your acquaintance did indeed die of COVID, but it must be remembered that such classifications were being handed very liberally, especially in the USA where COVID death classifications were being directly incentivized with money.
Not really: it is more a matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals. To attempt giving you the idea, I tried a web search for "Bergamo coffins" - I will not offer a selection, I cannot choose. I picked that because the case of Bergamo got famous, as probably the first one, but more were reported (in Brazil, I remember, etc).
In fact, I was not referring to one acquaintance, but many (very many - though, most of them elderly, and yet as healthy as they get). Let me tell you, from time to time I still get asked by skeptics "yes but what exactly did they die from": well, when they die without their lungs, I hold little doubts. This given, as I wrote, I definitely will not rule out that «bad treatments» may have brought the disease statuses to the collapse. What you saw was "normal, infected, healthy, healthy, healthy, worsening, compromised": it consumed them until sudden collapse, when recovery did not work.
Also: I have seen that many reason as if they were afraid of death and not afraid of damage. Some hold exactly opposite weights. And I have heard often, speaking with my local peers, remarks like "he was an Oak - and now he cannot do three steps without gasping". And this also involved young, sporty people.
So, as I am trying to tell, the risks are there, very real, very possible: it's their framing that is, to the best of my knowledge, still mysterious ("old or sick" goes in the direction but remains gross when applied to experience. It has the statistical ineffectiveness that would have you avoid driving a car and only travel by plane).
With the classifications ("died with" vs "died of") a real mess was made in many countries: but this really confused the image, also concealing, as I am trying to convey, the devastation it did there where it did hit hard.
I could say that the emergency management did not speak SAT.
Bergamo coffins are not a great example to pick because that was an artifact of telling the local undertakers (whom were all quite old) that handling the bodies would be a death sentence, so they refused to do it and as a result coffins piled up.
I'll try to be clearer - though I have myself difficulties in pointing the finger precisely to the point. With «matter of "local" (time-space) bubbles, not of individuals», I meant: sure, you may have an IFR of 0.1% as a raw division, but the questions press on why some have seen an apparent decimation, and many have seen nothing or almost nothing. Is it a perceptive illusion from observing at close distance an Erlang distribution? Or are there factors to be defined that would tell more than "old or sick"? Genetics? Organization? Societal features? Crime rates for Europe tell you very little if the values for the critical parts of Lyon and those of German remote countryside are mixed. I am still wondering what made experiences so different.
But anyway, your (undisputed) post was about the effectiveness of vaccines, and I had you digress after your «virtually never deadly», just wanting to precise that some of us have seen something much less comforting, and would recommend to remain wary of the risks (and some already infected people would say, you may want not to consider death as the risk, but the damages), in case the raw numbers may fascinate into suggestion that one can just relax. It is just a margin note. "Numbers are comforting" // "Yeah well..."