Briefly Noted: Covid Vaccine Hoax?

IMO, Trump is being very foolish in pushing this vaccine thing. Today at Lifesite news there's an hour long video interview: 

A medical expert [Dr. Theresa Deisher] with over 30 years' experience in the field of commercial biotechnology has said that COVID-19 vaccines developed at “warp speed” are likely not safe and not necessary. 

 

Here's the article that introduces the video:

The Coming Covid-19 Vaccine

The interview covers a lot of different angles and, while it is technical in parts, I highly recommend it. As one example, she gets into the important issue of the lack of transparency in the development of these vaccines:

Deisher questioned the lack of transparency shared by COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers at the various stages of production, raising concerns over the data and the reports of negative side effects in test groups. “Vaccine companies are not releasing the data to the public,” she said. “I think that the side effects in cherry-picked healthy individuals are very concerning and when you get out there into the wild, where people aren't cherry-picked, the side effects will just get worse. It's very concerning.” 

She also doesn't believe the vaccine is necessary to begin with. Fairly early in the interview she makes the point that, while initially we were unsure how this virus would behave, the intervening months have shown that it's behaving much like other similar respiratory viruses. What she means is--and she explains this--these viruses come in "waves", with each succeeding wave yielding a virus that is more contagious than the previous wave, but also less virulent. The result we're seeing fits that pattern: more infections, but fewer serious outcomes. In other words, she adds, it's on its way to being a common cold or flu type of phenomenon: Endemic, but something we can readily deal with.

And so she states, in effect, that there's really no point to this vaccine. No point, because why would you give a vaccine that has serious side effects to perfectly healthy people who are unlikely to suffer great harm?

Commenting on the need for a vaccine, Deisher laid out that “this virus to date has less than a 0.03% fatality rate and most of those people, I believe it's 92% or above, have other health problems; we're making a vaccine at warp speed for a virus that doesn't look like it's going to need a vaccine.” She added that “[i]t is possible, but I don’t believe it is desirable, nor do I believe that it’s safe,” with as much as “15% of the very healthy young volunteers [experiencing] significant side effects.”

I transcribed one portion of the interview in which Deisher gets into the question of efficacy rates. She maintains that the methodology was bogus (my word, not hers), and that the true efficacy rate is unlikely to exceed half of the touted 95%:

Q: How is vaccine efficacy determined, especially with such a short test time frame? Extrapolation of such a small sample size can lead to wrong conclusions. Also, how can we be certain that there will be no long term side effects?

A: So, for the Covid 19 vaccines they're determining efficacy, be it by measuring how many people get the Covid 19 infection. So, for example, the first one hundred people who get the infection, they unblind the treatment and in one of the vaccines, 95% of the people who got the infection got a placebo and five percent got the vaccine. That's where they come up with the 95% efficacy rate. But that's not actually a legitimate efficacy rate determination. They will hafta, I mean, there will be hundreds of thousands of people really out in the wild before we will know. And just as a comparison, the most effective flu vaccine that we have is only 44% effective. It's unlikely that they're going to do better. The coronaviruses are not good candidates for a vaccine--they're just not that highly immunogenic. And so it's not just the virus or the recombinant protein or the RMNA they're using. They're really having to boost the immune response, and that's probably driving the side effects.

That last bit about boosting the immune response is very important. It suggests what I've heard elsewhere, that these vaccines may behave more like unguided missiles--attacking all sorts of cells, and not just targeted virus cells. This would explain the wide range of serious side effects that have been reported.

Of course, this is an hour long interview, so there's much more: