> The vaccines massively reduced mortality and severe disease in the vulnerable populations. That is a big win.
That’s changing the goalposts. The vaccines were not necessary for the vast majority of the population or society as a whole to “open up”.
That’s assuming you analyze only physical harm from the spreading virus. After months of brainwashing, they were definitely required for large swathes of the population to given them a mental protection to come out of their shells.
> They also could have stopped the spread for the early variants, but the later ones were simply too contagious. There simply was no chance to keep transmission fully down at that point.
There was never a chance to keep transmission fully down. It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.
The criteria for the original license were the reduction in deaths and disease. Transmission wasn't even tested in the original phase III trials. The vaccines achieved their primary purpose, they prevented death and severe disease.
COVID was a major threat to a significant part of the population. The vaccines were effective and reduced the threat to those people enormously.
It would have been very nice and useful to stop transmission and achieve herd immunity. But even without that the vaccines were a huge win and saved a lot of lives.
Moderna seems to have moved, or removed, their initial testing results but you can still find an archive here. [1] The pharmaceutical industry was initially claiming that vaccination would completely prevent infection, as it typically does, let alone spread:
"There were 11 COVID‑19 cases in the Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%)."
It's easy to create false memories because the politicians and pharma industry simultaneously swapped the narrative to stopping hospitalization and death once it became completely clear the vaccines were not stopping infection, but that is not what their initial purpose was.
The virus the vaccine was first tested is quite different than the version we faced later. The virus is not a static target, but a quickly evolving one. And the later variants were far, far more contagious than the initial one.
The efficacy rate was not being measured based on death/sickness, but on any infection at all. It was supposed to be 94.1% effective in terms of completely preventing infection.
Again, I think you're having trouble reading. From your link:
> The median length of follow up for efficacy for participants in the study was 9 weeks post Dose 2. There were 11 COVID‑19 cases in the Moderna COVID‑19 Vaccine group and 185 cases in the placebo group, with a vaccine efficacy of 94.1% (95% confidence interval of 89.3% to 96.8%).
> Cases of COVID‑19, starting 14 days after Dose 2, were defined as symptomatic COVID‑19 requiring positive RT-PCR result and at least two systemic symptoms or one respiratory symptom.
A SARS-CoV-2 infection and a COVID-19 case aren't the same thing, for the same reason a HIV infection is not the same as having AIDS. The 94.1% number comes from counts of actual sickness, despite your assertions to the contrary.
Feel free to change the above to claim they stated it would create a negative PCR test or a PCR test with less than 1 one respiratory symptom or 2 systemic symptoms. It does not meaningfully change the issue whatsoever. The asterisk by infection went, without skipping a beat, from a 'PCR test and symptoms' to 'hospitalization/death.' These are very different things.
You complain about that, but proceed to doing it yourself, and you don't even address the point unlike the person you responded to.
> It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.
Which is funny, because even the very mild measures we had here in the Netherlands totally succeeded in preventing the flu from spreading. Haven't had a cold or flu in 1.5 years whereas normally would be sick at least 2-3 times. One strain of the flu was completely eradicated.
It sounds hyperbolic but look at any poll on how deadly people thought COVID was compared to how deadly it actually was. This study [1] found people believing that, on average, about 16% of people infected (diagnosed or not) with COVID died. In reality, there were a measured total of around 700 million cases and 7 million deaths. And vast numbers of cases went undiagnosed and so would never have ended up being tracked. In any case, the real IFR was well less than 1%. Brain washing is an unnecessarily loaded and divisive term, but it is safe to say that the media (and politicians) actively went out of their way to make people believe things that were not true, and they succeeded.
Public perception and reality are often at odds, but it doesn't mean the difference in perception is because of brainwashing, it's because humans are bad at measuring risk.
I'd argue you're creating a bit of a false dichotomy there. I completely agree that the public is bad at measuring risk. But do you disagree that the media/politicians were actively working to exaggerate the impact of the disease? And really this even applied to organizations like the CDC. Read this [1] page and tell me how long you think it'd take the average person to realize they're talking about child hospitalizations with COVID and not child hospitalizations from COVID?
The "summary" of the article is that "COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children and adolescents" followed by numbers talking about a shocking increase in rates. The fact it's talking about people hospitalized with COVID is hidden in a wall of text written in language that most people wouldn't be able to decipher. That more people tested positive for a more contagious variant, in any setting, is the most unremarkable news imaginable - spun into a terrifying headline, by the CDC no less.
I see no way to imagine that article was written in good faith. And it's been the absolute norm for the past 3 years now.
If the ones who are supposed to be informing the masses are deliberately feeding them information that leads them to inaccurately measure said risk, then that’s brainwashing.
That’s changing the goalposts. The vaccines were not necessary for the vast majority of the population or society as a whole to “open up”.
That’s assuming you analyze only physical harm from the spreading virus. After months of brainwashing, they were definitely required for large swathes of the population to given them a mental protection to come out of their shells.
> They also could have stopped the spread for the early variants, but the later ones were simply too contagious. There simply was no chance to keep transmission fully down at that point.
There was never a chance to keep transmission fully down. It was like trying to prevent a cold or the flu from spreading.