So, for a while I've been defending the vaccine. I do believe that it does some good for the elderly who are at risk of Covid-19, but I no longer believe that outweighs the damage it is doing to younger people.
If anyone's curious, I put the money into Realty Income Corp for now, which is now my largest holding.
I saw a release about this the other day.
Vaccine trial with 17000 patients at the very start of the pandemic and 99% of patients in both arms of the trial weren't even exposed to COVID. Again proving how redundant and absurd this whole exercise is.
Was it a safety or an effectiveness test?
Feb 2021 paper on COVID Absolute vs Relative Risk Reduction
This isn't the original article I came across, but it's a paper discussing the same concept.
The original press releases from Pfizer and Moderna claimed "95% effectiveness at reducing serious symptoms of COVID". Which is technically true and represents "Relative Risk Reduction" - ie That the vaccine did reduce symptomatic cases of COVID in the vaccine arm by 95% compared to the control arm.
The dishonest part though is that they failed to mention or account in their statistics that less than 1% of participants in either study arm actually acquired COVID.
So 99% of people in the study didn't benefit from the vaccine because they didn't need it. So real world effectiveness over the course of the study, "Absolute Risk Reduction" was closer to 1%. The vaccine did decrease cases of COVID by 95% in the 1% fraction that were exposed in the control arm, but in the big picture it didn't make any difference to the 99% of people who wouldn't have been exposed anyway and received no benefit.
There's a devil's advocate argument that the 99% of people in the study get ongoing protection from the study after it concludes. But it also shows how absurd all of this is when your landmark study in the midst of a pandemic that destroyed the world for two years can only demonstrate a 1% disease prevalence in your control arm that you offered no intervention to (ie 99% of people would have been fine anyway.
Efficacy test I'm pretty sure. It's from the original landmark Pfizer study first reported as "95% effective" back in November.