I believe that it is difficult to appreciate your other points when you claim things like:
Human challenge trials may have accelerated deployment of covid vaccines by more than a month, saving many thousands of lives and billions or trillions of dollars.
deploying covid vaccines a month sooner could have saved many thousands of lives
I think that it is reasonably unclear that CoViD vaccines have saved as many lives, given how wildly exaggerated the expected mortality figures that were used to made those claims were. Norman Fenton (“a mathematician and computer scientist specialized in Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks”) has talked and written about this and other issues for a while now:
Even if we accept a degree of effectiveness from the vaccine, which I dispute, given issues of fading immunity and inverse protection over time (particularly among most vulnerable cohorts)
we must admit that there were other less risky and very well-known interventions that could have been used in this situation, if we didn’t overreact (or accelerate) as much as we did:
Figure 2. Forest plot of the association of protective effect of vitamin D supplementation with intensive care unit admission in patients hospitalized with COVID-19. CI, confidence interval; OR, odds ratio [26,32,36,37,38].
A double-blind, randomized clinical trial study was conducted on 128 critically ill patients infected with COVID-19 who were randomly assigned to the intervention (fortified formula with n3-PUFA) (n = 42) and control (n = 86) groups. Data on 1 month survival rate, blood glucose, sodium (Na), potassium (K), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), creatinine (Cr), albumin, hematocrit (HCT), calcium (Ca), phosphorus (P), mean arterial pressure (MAP), O2 saturation (O2sat), arterial pH, partial pressure of oxygen (PO2), partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PCO2), bicarbonate (HCO3), base excess (Be), white blood cells (WBCs), Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), hemoglobin (Hb), platelet (Plt), and the partial thromboplastin time (PTT) were collected at baseline and after 14 days of the intervention.
The intervention group had significantly higher 1-month survival rate compared with the control group (21% vs 3%, P = 0.003). About 21% (n = 6) of the participants in the intervention group and only about 3% (n = 2) of the participants in the control group survived at least for 1 month after the beginning of the study.
The effect of omega-3 fatty acid supplementation on clinical and biochemical parameters of critically ill patients with COVID-19: a randomized clinical trial
Of the 50 patients enrolled in the N-acetylglucosamine treatment group, 48 patients had follow-up data (50.0% [24/48] male; median age 63 years, range: 29–88). Multivariate analysis showed the treatment group had improved hospital length-of-stay (β: 4.27 [95% confidence interval (CI) −5.67; −2.85], p < 0.001), ICU admission (odds ratio [OR] 0.32 [95% CI 0.10; 0.96], p = 0.049), and poor clinical outcome (OR 0.30 [95% CI 0.09; 0.86], p = 0.034). Mortality was significantly lower for treatment versus control on univariate analysis (12.5% vs. 28.0%, respectively; p = 0.039) and approached significance on multivariate analysis (p = 0.081).
And there are a number of doubts about the safety of these vaccines, which seem to create risks that never existed or that were remarkably uncommon among some population cohorts. We can see it, for example, in the risk of developing myocarditis:
Among 23 122 522 Nordic residents (81% vaccinated by study end; 50.2% female), 1077 incident myocarditis events and 1149 incident pericarditis events were identified. Within the 28-day period, for males and females 12 years or older combined who received a homologous schedule, the second dose was associated with higher risk of myocarditis, with adjusted IRRs of 1.75 (95% CI, 1.43-2.14) for BNT162b2 and 6.57 (95% CI, 4.64-9.28) for mRNA-1273. Among males 16 to 24 years of age, adjusted IRRs were 5.31 (95% CI, 3.68-7.68) for a second dose of BNT162b2 and 13.83 (95% CI, 8.08-23.68) for a second dose of mRNA-1273, and numbers of excess events were 5.55 (95% CI, 3.70-7.39) events per 100 000 vaccinees after the second dose of BNT162b2 and 18.39 (9.05-27.72) events per 100 000 vaccinees after the second dose of mRNA-1273. Estimates for pericarditis were similar.
Since the Israeli vaccination program was initiated on 20 December 2020, the time-period matching of the control cohort was calculated backward from 15 December 2020. Nine post-COVID-19 patients developed myocarditis (0.0046%), and eleven patients were diagnosed with pericarditis (0.0056%). In the control cohort, 27 patients had myocarditis (0.0046%) and 52 had pericarditis (0.0088%). Age (adjusted hazard ratio [aHR] 0.96, 95% confidence interval [CI]; 0.93 to 1.00) and male sex (aHR 4.42; 95% CI, 1.64 to 11.96) were associated with myocarditis. Male sex (aHR 1.93; 95% CI 1.09 to 3.41) and peripheral vascular disease (aHR 4.20; 95% CI 1.50 to 11.72) were associated with pericarditis. Post COVID-19 infection was not associated with either myocarditis (aHR 1.08; 95% CI 0.45 to 2.56) or pericarditis (aHR 0.53; 95% CI 0.25 to 1.13). We did not observe an increased incidence of neither pericarditis nor myocarditis in adult patients recovering from COVID-19 infection.
But there are many more safety signals, you can find about them very quickly by following health publications:
In July 2021 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly disclosed findings of a potential increase in four types of serious adverse events in elderly people who had had Pfizer’s covid-19 vaccine: acute myocardial infarction, disseminated intravascular coagulation, immune thrombocytopenia, and pulmonary embolism.1 Little detail was provided, such as the magnitude of the increased potential risk, and no press release or other alert was sent to doctors or the public. The FDA promised it would “share further updates and information with the public as they become available.”
Eighteen days later, the FDA published a study planning document (or protocol) outlining a follow-up epidemiological study intended to investigate the matter more thoroughly.2 This recondite technical document disclosed the unadjusted relative risk ratio estimates originally found for the four serious adverse events, which ranged from 42% to 91% increased risk. (Neither absolute risk increases nor confidence intervals were provided.) More than a year later, however, the status and results of the follow-up study are unknown. The agency has not published a press release, or notified doctors, or published the findings by preprint or the scientific literature or updated the vaccine’s product label.
I will, thus, claim that these vaccines represent a strong point against rushing out new treatments, that there were no reason to rush them out even more, and that a more conservative approach would have, in fact, prevented damage, at least, I believe, in terms of years of life lost, given that CoViD seems to very rarely pose a threat for young people, whereas these vaccines seem to cause more secondary effects precisely among young people.
I believe that it is difficult to appreciate your other points when you claim things like:
I think that it is reasonably unclear that CoViD vaccines have saved as many lives, given how wildly exaggerated the expected mortality figures that were used to made those claims were. Norman Fenton (“a mathematician and computer scientist specialized in Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis with Bayesian Networks”) has talked and written about this and other issues for a while now:
Even if we accept a degree of effectiveness from the vaccine, which I dispute, given issues of fading immunity and inverse protection over time (particularly among most vulnerable cohorts)
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj-2021-069052
maybe by the promotion of IgG4 antibodies:
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202303.0441/v1
and who knows if by targeting Interferon Regulatory Factor 3:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2021.789462/full
we must admit that there were other less risky and very well-known interventions that could have been used in this situation, if we didn’t overreact (or accelerate) as much as we did:
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/16/1/130
The effect of omega-3 fatty acid supplementation on clinical and biochemical parameters of critically ill patients with COVID-19: a randomized clinical trial
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-021-02795-5
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282940/
And there are a number of doubts about the safety of these vaccines, which seem to create risks that never existed or that were remarkably uncommon among some population cohorts. We can see it, for example, in the risk of developing myocarditis:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9021987/
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/11/8/2219
But there are many more safety signals, you can find about them very quickly by following health publications:
https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj.o2527
I will, thus, claim that these vaccines represent a strong point against rushing out new treatments, that there were no reason to rush them out even more, and that a more conservative approach would have, in fact, prevented damage, at least, I believe, in terms of years of life lost, given that CoViD seems to very rarely pose a threat for young people, whereas these vaccines seem to cause more secondary effects precisely among young people.
Would someone care to explain to me what I did wrong to deserve getting my karma obliterated?