Was I right about the math when the covid mRNA's were tested and released into the market?
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JLeslie (
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1 month ago
I can’t find the old Q’s, but when Moderna and Pfizer first were released, they were said to b earound 94% effective at preventing disease. On several Q’s I questioned it, because I live where some of the testing was done, and I knew that we had very little covid where I live, so there was not much chance to catch covid during the testing time. I argued if there is not much chance to catch it, how can we really know how effective it is. Some of the math savvy jellies told me why the statistics would still be accurate.
I also argued that J&J showed lower efficacy, probably partly because it was tested in places with more disease going around, and in fact even scientists were saying it. So, it seemed to reinforce the idea that vaccines tested in low incidence areas would not be well tested for prevention.
Fast forward today when we know the mRNA vaccines did not prevent disease 94% of the time. It does look like they help prevent severe disease, I am not talking about that for this Q.
Why were the scientists wrong if not the low disease rate in the community? What would be the other reason for the mathematical estimate for efficacy to be so off?
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19 Answers
I am not sure what you are asking here. Do you want us to find those older Qs for you? Or to find links that prove you were right and the vaccines were not as effective as touted?
Please share the evidence that “ …the mathematical estimate for efficacy to be so off”?
Not sure where to go, here, after multiple readings of this.
Thanks
@canidmajor I’m trying to understand why the scientists were so wrong. It’s not about me being right, because I could still be wrong in my reasoning, I know that.
I don’t think finding the old Q’s really matters, because the info and facts are still the same. When Moderna and Pfizer received initial approval it was based on trials of 30,000 participants and concluded a 94% prevention rate during the trial. What is the explanation now of why the trials were so wrong for efficacy? You know I am skeptical about a lot of things, and watching everyone just follow along and accept anything fed to them even when it doesn’t make sense is really frustrating to me.
It also frustrates me that people who already had some vaccine trust issues can point to it.
The trials proved the vaccines were overall safe, that was the most important thing in the trials.
This doubt is why i haven’t gotten one boister, after the initial 2 (initial vaccine consisted of 2).
Please forgive my continued confusion, @JLeslie, but I don’t actually recall that they were so far off. Can you provide the links for that? I have actually looked for those this morning, and couldn’t find anything beyond a few people being upset that the vaccines were not 100% effective, which I chalk up to mutation rates and the difficulty in tracking different strains at any given time, sort of a perfect storm of Heisenberg issues.
Just adding, the main point of the Q is not questioning covid vaccines, as I said in my original post, there is good evidence the vaccines help prevent severe disease, and probably it does prevent disease in a portion of the people who receive it.
I am curious in terms of evaluating future drugs and vaccines that come to market. It was not mutations, even though later mutations certainly are a concern we need to deal with in terms of updating the vaccines.
@canidmajor I provided links above in my answer to @Tropical_Willie It only took a few months after vaccines started to see people were still catching covid after vaccination. The CDC now says COVID 19-vaccines are effective at protecting people from getting seriously ill, being hospitalized, and dying. Vaccination remains the safest strategy for avoiding hospitalizations, long-term health outcomes, and death.
CDC also says, The protection against infection tends to be modest and sometimes short-lived, but the vaccines are very effective at protecting against severe illness.
So, that is very far from what the vaccine manufacturers first put forward in their trial results.
Sorry i spelled booster wrong , above. New phone, annoying spell check.
Well then, @JLeslie, to answer your question, I guess you were probably right if that’s what you were saying.
I just don’t know for sure if I was right regarding the math. I was hoping some of the jellies better at math might be able to explain it. On the old Q’s they explained to me why I was supposedly wrong, and it made no sense to me then. I wonder when they look at it now if they see the equation differently, or maybe they still stand by their answer with the information that was provided at the time.
It seems a little ridiculous that I did better math than all of those scientists. I doubt that.
I doubt you did better math, @JLeslie, I think the reports were, probably both intentionally and unintentionally skewed. The sources, at the time, were probably reporting specific types of outcomes (X% of fewer hospitalizations, Y% fewer deaths) and it came across to the people putting together the statements may have willfully generalized and fudged a bit.
To convince the majority of the population to get vaccinated was the primary goal, especially considering the populace who had decided that Covid wasn’t a really big deal (remember, we had some of those here) and didn’t want to bother protecting the more vulnerable (yeah, we had those, too).
In such a fraught situation as a global plague, as the results travel from the lab, to the test groups, to the analysts, to the publicists, the details probably would get more loosely interpreted for the greater good.
@canidmajor Interesting to me that you wrote they might have purposely skewed it, I think of you as one of the voices accepting “the science” during that time, but maybe I am misunderstanding that for wanting to go along with the basic message that covid is something to worry about and better safe than sorry.
I don’t think they lied about the numbers, I think it was what I said, the testing was done in places where there was very little covid. The main county The Villages crosses through was one of the lowest numbers of cases per 100,000 in the state of Florida.
There were a number of threads around that time where I was part of discussions, and I always maintained that new vaccines are never expected to have a high percentage of absolute preventative outcomes, that the point is to lessen the worse case scenarios.
I doubt that you are so naive as to think that public relations doesn’t play a large part in any reporting in cases like this, or that results from one testing group (the Villages) are the only ones being considered.
Correct, they tested in several communities, not just The Villages.
As I understand it scientists recruited tens of thousands of volunteers and randomly assigned them to a vaccine group or a placebo group. Participants were monitored and tested to see if they developed Covid. The number of cases in the vaccine group was then compared with the number of cases in the placebo group.
The two groups were indistinguishable from each other as they were randomly assigned. The only difference was one group was then given the vaccine and the other wasn’t. Any difference in infection rates could then be attributed to the vaccine alone.
This result didn’t mean that everyone in the US had the same chance of catching Covid, where you lived was another factor, but it did mean that everyone taking the vaccine could improve their chances of avoiding it by 95%.
It’s not a straightforward math issue. It comes down to bias. Bias in sampling (volunteer bias where more healthy, more educated people volunteer for a vaccine), bias in outcome measures (how was COVID identified? how often were people tested? did asymptomatic cases count? how long were they followed?), etc. We’ve seen ourselves how people incorrectly perform RAT tests at home, how poorly they identify negative COVID (meaning that a positive test = COVID, but a negative test doesn’t mean you don’t have it). We now know that, especially with frequent infections, people are often asymptomatic. It really comes down to what was measured and how, and not the “math”.
@Cupcake I actually really question whether there are a lot of asymptomatic cases, I don’t think there are. I think there are a lot of mild cases that people dismiss as allergies or colds, and also there are people who are infectious who are pre-symptomatic and were being called asymptomatic. Maybe the scientists followed up on the people who tested negative to see if they became ill, and confirmed they never became sick and I don’t know about it. I know the random study done in The Villages the two people who came up positive and asymptomatic, became ill within 24 hours and they were no longer counted as asymptomatic carriers, but it was only a 2,000 person study done very early in the pandemic.
It is true that healthier people tend to volunteer for the phase testing, but pretty much everyone in The Villages is higher risk due to age.
It’s a little annoying that people beat up on me when I questioned the efficacy probability. I didn’t know if I would be right or wrong, it could have wound up that the vaccine had an over 90% prevention rate, I just questioned it due to the low infection rate here, and I was told that I was wrong in my logic. Jellies explained to me more than once why the math was right. and maybe it was, that is what I was trying to figure out. Maybe the math was right, but the data set just didn’t mean much.
I just think most everyone stops thinking when things get political. I also think it is bad for the next time we need to quarantine people or shut things down that it looks like scientists were “wrong” or media had an agenda. Luckily, I have not seen any news items with people freaking out if a school or business has been closed for flu or covid, and of course that has happened in the last two years, because it happens almost every year in places in the US.
No, I don’t believe your math is wrong. At least it is in line with the bravo sulu that was being broadcast about these vaccines. These were not vaccines. They were treatments. They were experimental and had not gone through all the testing before they were thrust onto the public and were being forced into them. Testing for these things require an evaluation of long term effects of the product. That wasn’t even due to be completed until sometime in 2023. So there could have been long term effects that were being suppressed and which could be impacting people even now.
The mRNA technology was developed somewhere around 1989 and was deemed a great breakthrough that could stop diseases up to and including cancer. Yet since its inception, it was never cleared for use for anything because it couldn’t pass testing.
These vaccines were a scam to get money for Big Pharma. When they first came out, with these miracle vaccines they were, indeed, touted as being highly effective at stopping the disease. When it started coming out that vaccinated people were getting Covid-19, the story changed to the vaccines made it impossible for the vaccinated person to transmit the disease. When they discovered that vaccinated people had as much or more viral load in their nasal area that claim went away as well. The story then went on to say it would help minimize the impact of the disease if you were vaccinated with several boosters.
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