Covid vaccines - thread banned users in First Post

All the usual red flags

"Big pharma was bad in the past" - All companies have histories, e.g. IBM has had lawsuits, scandals, regulatory issues, etc. It doesn't mean modern product X or Y is automatically "bad". It's judged on it's own merit and ever changing modern standards and regulations.

"Companies make money" - Mask-makers made billions, doesn't mean anything nefarious is happening

"And we are left to trust in the system" - There's plenty of transparency and information available. This is available to experts, scientists, medical professionals, vaccine researchers and makers who are taking the same vaccines we are.

I don't see any mention of your "appeal to motive" about profits, I don't see a cherry-picked selection of issues Pfizer has had during it's lifetime, and as above, it's an editorialized opinion, wanting the release of information now instead of later this year. I support that, but I also am aware it's hundreds of thousands of pages of data that needs to be prepped and written up, and these things can't be done instantly.

I believe you wrote you reluctantly have had only one dose, why are you partially vaccinated? 94% of the adult population here is, a much higher amount of medical professionals and experts are, I am quite sure the authors of this article are, do you know something they don't?

Smiley faces the cornerstone of every reputable response. It's pretty simple, to repeat:

I believe you wrote you reluctantly have had only one dose, why are you partially vaccinated? 94% of the adult population here is, a much higher amount of medical professionals and experts are, I am quite sure the authors of this article are, do you know something they don't?

Its an editorial.

Pay attention to the footnote

• Competing interests: We have read and understood BMJ policy on declaration of interests and declare that The BMJ is a co-founder of the AllTrials campaign. PD was one of the Cochrane reviewers studying influenza antivirals beginning in 2009, who campaigned for access to data. He also helped organise the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Licensed Medicines (CAALM), which formally petitioned the FDA to refrain from fully approving any covid-19 vaccine this year (docket FDA-2021-P-0786). PD is also a member of Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, which has sued the FDA to obtain the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine data. The views and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Maryland.

It's an opinion piece. People in the industry can have differing or even extreme opinions, it's interesting that you highlight this one.

Here's an opinion piece responding to Doshi's views on ""trustworthiness & meaningfulness" of COVID vaccine results"

Here's another opinion piece on one of Doshi's editorials

http://hildabastian.net/index.php/covid-19/103-unpacking-doshi-take

And here's a response carried in the Lancet

Here's a piece questioning what's going on at the BMJ, and why it's being embraced by anti-vaxxers

Interesting.

Is there a reason you are avoiding my question?

You are partially vaccinated correct?

You read all those links in 6 minutes? Wow, impressive.

Interesting how I picked up red flags that other people have also picked up on, and if we look further we find:

"So I was surprised to stumble upon an article titled “Johns Hopkins Scientist Reveals Shocking Report on Flu Vaccines,” which popped up on an anti-vaccine website two weeks ago. Johns Hopkins University is my own institution, and I hadn’t heard any shocking new findings. I soon discovered that this article contained only a tiny seed of truth, surrounded by a mountain of anti-vaccine misinformation. Most of it focused on a report published in early 2013 by Peter Doshi, a former postdoctoral fellow at Hopkins.

First, as Snopes.com has already pointed out, Doshi is not a virologist or an epidemiologist, but rather an anthropologist who studies comparative effectiveness research. He never conducted influenza research at Hopkins. (He’s now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Pharmacy.) Second, Doshi’s 2013 article was an opinion piece (a “feature”), not an original research article, and it did not report any new findings. Third, it is highly misleading to suggest (as the anti-vax article’s title does) that Doshi somehow represents Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, the flu vaccine is required of all personnel who have contact with patients, as a good-practices effort to minimize the risk that a patient will catch the flu from a caregiver."

Since I suspect you aren't reading these, to highlight from a piece I previously provided:

"Since then, Peter Doshi somehow managed to become an associate editor of The BMJ. How this happened, I have no idea, but periodically he publishes posts for The BMJ that are—to put it kindly—far below the standards that a medical journal with the history of The BMJ should ever associate itself with. Early this year, for instance, he published one more such blog post entitled, Pfizer and Moderna’s “95% effective” vaccines—we need more details and the raw data. It was a post custom designed to try to claim that Pfizer and Moderna had exaggerated the efficacy of their vaccines through some statistical prestidigitation. He also called for the “raw data,” echoing a Thacker technique of cloaking dubious claims in issues that almost everyone can agree on, such as transparency in clinical trials. (John Skylar and Skeptical Raptor also discussed the deception behind his articles.) Doshi once also bought into a truly risible conspiracy theory about the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) that I hadn’t even seen from antivaxxers. There was much mockery. More recently, Doshi published more misinformation in The BMJ about COVID-19 vaccines, claiming that there was “no biodistribution data” (even though there was and biodistribution data aren’t required for vaccines anyway) and insinuating that the trials had been unblinded earlier this year not out of ethical concerns about leaving the subjects in the placebo group susceptible to a potentially deadly pandemic disease, but rather to hide differences in adverse events between the groups and to facilitate the ability of businesses and local governments to mandate COVID-19 vaccines not yet approved by the FDA but only available under an EUA. (I wrote about the issue of unblinding the Pfizer and Moderna clinical trials in April. Suffice to say that it’s a complex issue of clinical trial ethics and science, far more so than what Doshi implies.)"

As mentioned by others, I have zero idea how this guy is still an editor at the BMJ. But thanks to you, I now know why I've been seeing so many BMJ articles in anti-vax threads, they are all this one guy, Peter Doshi.

I refuse to answer your questions until you answer mine is a well worn anti-vaxxer path. Usually followed by a comical stomping of feet and storming out of the thread. Why do you dodge?

You paraphrased Peter Doshi directly in your post:

You wrote: "Big pharma does not have a stellar track record. At least three of the companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue."

He wrote: "Big pharma is the least trusted industry.30 At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars.31 One pleaded guilty to fraud.31 Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.32"

I replied that your post, effectively his words, demonstrated anti-vaxx red flags. Lo and behold turns out others have pointed out that the guy you were lifting almost verbatim has displayed all sorts of anti-vaccine red flags going back years. So yes, I was bang on.

That's a changed story from previously about why you didn't get the second shot.

It's posted above, looking at the rest of the thread it's clear you didn't really know what you were talking about then (comments re: immunity especially). You seem to have spun quickly down the rabbit hole since then, at least the certs aren't needed now.

It sounds like you would have got the shot if you hadn't been showing some symptoms of COVID and then spun out when a doctor told you to get a PCR test.

Yeah my bad I didn't read the entire piece, AND I missed that crucial footnote. I also made the mistake of assuming this guy was in a related field.

Do you have a habit of reading the BMJ on a regular basis? Because these sort of blog posts don't usually show up in the news, but they do feature heavily on anti-vaxx and crank sites/feeds..

I am still trying to give you the benefit of the doubt, but you seem to be pulling a bit of a Peter Doshi on us here..

Right, cognitive bias, says the poster who picks a very juicy outlier from the consensus to side with

What is the consensus of the Lancet, HSE, UK gov, experts, etc on the safety of Covid vaccines?

Okay, and you disagree with that?

So all of those experts who disagree with you are all lying? Are they just not as good at medicine as you?

I think your worry is misplaced, reading one of the latest ones they address this

"Results

The rate of a positive COVID-19 test varies by age and vaccination status. The rate of a positive COVID-19 test is substantially lower in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated individuals up to the age of 29. In individuals aged greater than 30, the rate of a positive COVID-19 test is higher in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated (Table 12). This is likely to be due to a variety of reasons, including differences in the population of vaccinated and unvaccinated people as well as differences in testing patterns.

The rate of hospitalisation within 28 days of a positive COVID-19 test increases with age, and is substantially greater in unvaccinated individuals compared to vaccinated individuals.

The rate of death within 28 days or within 60 days of a positive COVID-19 test increases with age, and again is substantially greater in unvaccinated individuals compared to fully vaccinated individuals.

Interpretation of data

These data should be considered in the context of the vaccination status of the population groups shown in the rest of this report. In the context of very high vaccine coverage in the population, even with a highly effective vaccine, it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective. This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritised in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease. Individuals in risk groups may also be more at risk of hospitalisation or death due to non-COVID-19 causes, and thus may be hospitalised or die with COVID-19 rather than from COVID-19. The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths should not be used to assess vaccine effectiveness because of differences in risk, behaviour and testing in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. The case rates in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations are crude rates that do not take into account underlying statistical biases in the data. There are likely to be systematic differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, for example

testing behaviour is likely to be different between people with different vaccination status, resulting in differences in the chances of being identified as a case

• many of those who were at the head of the queue for vaccination are those at higher risk from COVID-19 due to their age, their occupation, their family circumstances or because of underlying health issues

• people who are fully vaccinated and people who are unvaccinated may behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions and therefore may have differing levels of exposure to COVID-19

• people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19 in the weeks or months before the period of the cases covered in the report. This gives them some natural immunity to the virus which may have contributed to a lower case rate in the past few weeks

These biases become more evident as more people are vaccinated and the differences between the vaccinated and unvaccinated population become systematically different in ways that are not accounted for without undertaken formal analysis of vaccine effectiveness. Vaccine effectiveness has been formally estimated from a number of different sources and is described on pages 4 to 12 in this report."

That addresses it pretty well. And on the chart below that (which I suspect you are reading) they put another big disclaimer

"1 In the context of very high vaccine coverage in the population, even with a highly effective vaccine, it is expected that a large proportion of cases, hospitalisations and deaths would occur in vaccinated individuals, simply because a larger proportion of the population are vaccinated than unvaccinated and no vaccine is 100% effective. This is especially true because vaccination has been prioritised in individuals who are more susceptible or more at risk of severe disease. Individuals in risk groups may also be more at risk of hospitalisation or death due to non-COVID-19 causes, and thus may be hospitalised or die with COVID-19 rather than because of COVID-19."

Does that alleviate your worry?

The very fact that countries made it impossible to sue the corporations if it destroys some of their people raises an eyebrow no?

Why aren't they open source also? If they are so crucial for humanities survival?