I am a person whom you would label as anti vaccine.
I would not label myself as such.
I’m one of those irritating people who is not a Doctor, who has done my own research with each vaccine and determined the risk benefit for every vaccine on the market does not compute.
That’s not to say that a vaccine couldn’t exist in the future upon which, after conducting my own due diligence, I may decide to take or give to my kids.
I remain in the category you label as anti vaccine for one reason only:
No Doctor will answer my questions or address my concerns. They don’t even know what I’m talking about. They refuse to look at that which I’m asking them about. They only scold me for asking. Bully. Name call. Gas light. This has been going on for 15 yrs.
It’s no fun wearing the scarlet “A” for anti-vax. I would love for your safe and effective narrative to be true. Honest to God.
I understand that you believe you cannot change my mind because you dismiss me as an irrational conspiracy theorist. Ok. Fine. Let’s assume that’s true.
However, even a completely insane person can ask a rational question. When reasonable questions do not have reasonable answers, what then?
I’m tempted to ask you to play a game. Forget who I am. What does it matter(?) The game would be, as long as I ask a reasonable question your challenge would be to provide a reasonable answer. And I am permitted to continue to ask reasonable questions and receive reasonable answers for as long as it takes for one of us to change their perspective.
By now, I’m smart enough to know this:
If I can not change your mind it’s because you will refuse to look. Very quickly, you’ll shoot the messenger. Alarm! Alarm! Silence her immediately! That’s all you could do because the truth is truth. I can’t change it and neither can you. You can only refuse to look.
And when I ask, please show me, that which you believe to exist will evaporate upon inspection.
The way to reverse vaccine hesitancy is for Pharmaceutical companies to create better vaccines. Ones which are actually safe, effective and necessary. Products they will stand behind and accept liability for. Vaccine hesitancy exists because the products are shit. People are Not idiots. Eventually, they figure it out. And as long as the general public continues to blame people like me, we probably aren’t going to get any improvements.
Thank you for this article. I read this commentary and felt similarly. It reminded me of the moment in early 2022 when our head of infectious disease, at an employee “town hall”, recommended the covid vaccine for pregnant women. He literally said “the vaccine is safe for pregnant women”. After one year of use in humans???? This is someone who I previously thought was intelligent and understood nuance, i couldnt believe my ears. That was the moment I lost faith.
Your last paragraph sums up the problem they have created.
Lets get real. There is no reliable "data" on the phantom called Covid. This is an "in silico" genome selected out of millions that were generated from several short nucleotide chains found in the secretions of one patient suffering from pneumonia. Anyone can find the initial study by searching Wuhan novel virus. The incidence of "cases" is completely fraudulent. PCR is not a test---it is a laboratory procedure. Antibody tests are notoriously unreliable due to frequent cross reactions and other problems. And that is before we even consider the massive mislabeling of upper respiratory infections as Covid in hospitals that were openly bribed to do so. Anyone who believes in asymptomatic respiratory infections is really wandering out somewhere in fantasy land. To top it off, the entire scenario was clearly laid out in Event 201 in October 2019. Look at it before it gets scrubbed from the internet.
I agree that Mark’ and co are refusing to see the elephant. But there are two elephants. The first is to provide peer reviewed RCT’s for their efficacy claims and for their safety claims. The second elephant is to recognize and take ownership of their many mistakes. These have been many and continuous. Get vaccinated with 2 shots and...
- you won’t get sick
- you won’t die
- you won’t infect your grandmother
- unvaxed people are therefor bad
- natural immunity is poor
- the vaccine is completely safe for everyone
- delta is the endgame. No more variants
Clearly they have been winging it and practicing by gosh, by golly science. But are they going to “own” this string of incompetence? Nope. So when can trust be regained?
The emergence of Omicron was completely unexpected by (almost) all of the community and now, last time I checked, we had 22 variants circulating in NA, none of which were XBB, but the booster i was being asked (pushed) to take was based on XBB. When I went in for my influenza shot, would I ask to get an out of date shot from last year for an influenza variant that no longer existed? No, that would be stupid. So, does that mean the FDA is stupid or just desperate and intractable? Hmmmm. Can’t build trust here.
Maybe I can find one peer reviewed RCT to help me overcome my now extreme skepticism of the FDA. Ahhhh, nope. Not a single one.
What about my anecdotal experience?
Half my extended family is vaccinated and half is not. We have all had delta and omicron. There has been no discernible difference in outcomes even though our ages span 5 year olds up to 68 year olds. Huh.
We don’t know anyone, in over 3 years, that has died or been hospitalized due to covid (luckily). However, I personally know three people that had very serious covid vaccine injuries. That’s a bad ratio so I certainly can’t garner any confidence here. What is the net benefit vs risk? Not looking good from this perspective.
I see data that shows a high percentage of those dying from covid have been vaccinated. Hmmmm.
I see the latest data showing higher hospitalization rates for those vaccinated, but the data looks very conflicted. Hmmmm. Who is right?
We clearly need much more time and research to sort out the true benefit or not, of these novel vaccine. The end game seems a long way away, but at this point, based on the slow progression of research, it is going decidedly against the FDA.
So my conclusion is that the FDA hasn’t shot itself in the foot, but instead in the temple.
Recovery in trust can only happen when the FDA directors are fired.
In debate and in efforts of persuasion, it has often been said that to lose the language is to lose the argument. We have been losing the argument on these Covid genetic drug jabs by using the term vaccine when referring to them. They are genetic drugs and should have gone through the FDA approval process reserved for pharmaceuticals, and specifically for genetic drugs, rather than the more lax process reserved for vaccines. Look at the pharmacokinetics of these drugs: Dose, distribution, duration. The 30 or 100 mics (or much less depending on lot #, vial mishandling and/or manufacturing variability) put in the shoulder is a pro-drug, meaning it must lead to a different substance that is the biologic agent (spike protein) to which the immune system reacts. So what is the DOSE of the spike protein ultimately produced in your body? Who knows? Could be billions, could be trillions, might be none at all. They lied to us on the DISTRIBUTION - doesn’t just stay in the shoulder, it goes everywhere. And what is the DURATION of action? Historical and traditional vaccines stay in the shoulder and the known quantity of protein degrades in a few days. “Vaccine” induced spike protein has been found in the body months after receiving an injection. And now we are learning about mRNA “frame shifting” where foreign proteins other than the spike protein are being produced by our ribosomes in cells transfected with this pro-drug. To call all this genetic complexity a vaccine is propaganda that provides these drugs an innocence connotation they have not earned and do not deserve. More detail is here: https://jackcaskinsmd.substack.com/p/the-duplicitous-design-of-dose-distribution
This is my wife's story and it is still going on. She has been an allergic person all her life. After having our second child she could not tolerate bananas, potatoes, and cherries. The cherries brought on a pretty severe bronchospasm. These symptoms disappeared after about two years. Now in her seventies she cannot tolerate dairy and has some nasal symptoms.
She had the first shot and second Moderna Vaccine and then we went back for the first booster. Three days after the booster she developed a dermatologic rash of macropapules and atopic area just about all over her body with the worst areas on her chest and back. The Dermatologists didn't know what to make of it but when we suggested maybe a reaction to Covid vaccine they didn't buy in. I did a literature search at the NIH website PubMed and found a very lengthy paper complete with picture that looked exactly like my wife's rash. The authors talked about possible Long Covid.
After about 6 months the rash just cleared up with Pramoxine cream and Triamcinolone 1%. No help from antihistamines.
Then Omicron came along and we both got it. Very mild flu like symptoms. Easy peasy, glad we got the shot. But after two weeks my wife broke out with a redish rash and severe urticaria. Slightly raised itchy areas pretty much over the same area as before. The itching was so bad she was in tears. The Pramoxine cream (Cera-Ve) was helpful but sometimes only lasted for an hour. Went back to Triamcinolone which she used for a month or so and then we tried Hydrocortisone 1% which, oila ,worked as well.
The itching has interferred with her sleep and we have gone through pounds of cream but she is better. Scratching has caused capillary bleeding which clears up after a few days. Dealing with this Long Covid has also depressed her on some days but overall she has continued to exercise and eat well. Her Gp says no more Covid shots. I have found 7 studies that call these skin reactions the result of Covid. I think there are more.
Lately she has had cream free days and the rash has pretty much disappeared. We worry that if she gets Covid again that she will react badly again but we are thankful that the worst is over.
Pick a vaccine. Any vaccine. Click on it to go to the insert. Scroll down to section “6.2 Post Marketing Experience”. Look under “Immune System Disorders” or “Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue Disorders”. You’ll find Pruritas, Urticaria and skin rash listed as an adverse reaction on Every. Single. Vaccine Insert. Including CoVid 19 vaccines.
Yes no argument there. But never expected 2 years of macropapules facial rash, incredible itching that was almost constant with interruption of sleep and fever, cough and hot one minute and cold the next. No one was writing about this and the Derms had no clue until well into the pandemic when articles began to appear. Evidently there is a difference in the types of vaccines that cause these skin problems and it would be good to know more about that. The good news is that it seems that my wife's immune system is winning the battle after two years of pramoxine lotions and low potency steroids. I still believe in vaccines but we need to know all the risks.
Why is there not detailed information available to us on the people they claim are dying of/with(?) Covid currently. Age? Comorbidities? How many Covid shots? Was Covid an incidental finding or direct cause of death? This information would go a long way toward rebuilding trust and allow us, as physicians, to give some kind of informed consent/recommendations to our patients when they ask whether they should get yet another Covid shot. At this point I don’t know what our public health goal is when I see patients of every status - no Covid vax, natural immunity, hybrid immunity, multi-vax with 1st episode of Covid - all doing well with infection with this version of Covid. The recommendations currently coming from our agencies simply do not make sense to those of us with boots on the ground who have cared for thousands of patients with Covid. If physicians can’t trust what they say, then we have no hope until there is a major regime change.
Another reason so many people don't trust public health is the revisionist definition of a vaccine. Prior to COVID there was a general understanding that a vaccine was sterilizing; i.e., if you got a vaccine for smallpox, you didn't get smallpox. When you got your flu shot, it was called a flu shot, not a flu vaccine. I always assumed, as I believe most people did, that it is called a flu shot because it is not sterilizing.
If you recall, the CDC changed the definition of a "vaccine" after the "COVID-19 vaccines" were rolled out and found not to be sterilizing. IMHO, because the CDC tried to be clever and use the trust we all had for vaccines to promote a "COVID prophylactic" as a "COVID vaccine" which we can all see is a completely ineffective "vaccine" (as in sterilizing), the word "vaccine" no longer has the connotation of "effective".
Long winded way of saying, the government destroyed the trust we all had in shots called vaccines.
For example, in this computer model Dr Cifu cites there are all sorts of parameters that are CRITICAL to the accuracy of the models predictions such as vaccine effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness duration, and virus transmission rates which are likely highly unreliable given the failure of our public health apparatus to properly implement studies during the pandemic. Nevermind competing questions of vaccine injury and harm... also not adequately studied.
"Trying to convince all people that all vaccines are the same is not the way to raise vaccination rates, garner trust, or improve public health." 100% spot on. This starts out as intellectually dishonest, people can tell, and they won't trust you. All of the rhetoric starts out as dishonest. The best science communication is in simply stating the facts as clearly as possible, including the huge unknowns. There is no way to dumb things down and be honest (by either inclusion or omission) at the same time.
Exactly. Computer models predicting COVID deaths were wildly, laughably inaccurate. Why on earth would you believe computer models showing vaccines saved millions of lives? And is this millions of lives in the US with a population of 330M, or in the world, with a population of 8B?
I am still dumbfounded by the lack of owning of errors and short memory these folks have. The damage done to all of our trust in institutions I have turned to for educated, science based help is forever damaged. I am to the point my knee jerk reaction to any "scientific facts" I hear in the public health realm is.... "ok what is their angle, and how are they trying to manipulate me"
I found the comments after the article quite interesting. A Dr De Maria wrote "Their choice of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination as an example of successful protection falls short of reinforcing the bond of trust that needs to be fostered" Wow how true.....
I think at least a generation of medical progress has been lost, maybe more.
Adam, vaccines are not "safe and effective" just like there is no "safe sex". Some vaccines are safer than others. Some vaccines are more effective than others. But all of them have side effects that have permanently injured kids and adults. There's a reason the pharma companies demanded liability from injury and the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act was passed - they knew that unlike most other medications, they would take a loss on vaccines if they had to cover damages, especially to kids.
Let that sink in: If Pharma refuses to stand behind it's own products - if it thinks they're so dangerous that they will cause financial losses, why should I take them, let alone give them to my kids??? I will believe that vaccines are "safe enough" when Pharma actually puts their money where their mouth is.
Nice summary. I had similar reaction to the Viewpoint. Gov’t health leaders created this disastrous damage to public trust in vaccines and public health in general. Now they are telling busy front-line doctors like yourself to clean up their mess.
Dr Cifu,
I am a person whom you would label as anti vaccine.
I would not label myself as such.
I’m one of those irritating people who is not a Doctor, who has done my own research with each vaccine and determined the risk benefit for every vaccine on the market does not compute.
That’s not to say that a vaccine couldn’t exist in the future upon which, after conducting my own due diligence, I may decide to take or give to my kids.
I remain in the category you label as anti vaccine for one reason only:
No Doctor will answer my questions or address my concerns. They don’t even know what I’m talking about. They refuse to look at that which I’m asking them about. They only scold me for asking. Bully. Name call. Gas light. This has been going on for 15 yrs.
It’s no fun wearing the scarlet “A” for anti-vax. I would love for your safe and effective narrative to be true. Honest to God.
I understand that you believe you cannot change my mind because you dismiss me as an irrational conspiracy theorist. Ok. Fine. Let’s assume that’s true.
However, even a completely insane person can ask a rational question. When reasonable questions do not have reasonable answers, what then?
I’m tempted to ask you to play a game. Forget who I am. What does it matter(?) The game would be, as long as I ask a reasonable question your challenge would be to provide a reasonable answer. And I am permitted to continue to ask reasonable questions and receive reasonable answers for as long as it takes for one of us to change their perspective.
By now, I’m smart enough to know this:
If I can not change your mind it’s because you will refuse to look. Very quickly, you’ll shoot the messenger. Alarm! Alarm! Silence her immediately! That’s all you could do because the truth is truth. I can’t change it and neither can you. You can only refuse to look.
And when I ask, please show me, that which you believe to exist will evaporate upon inspection.
The way to reverse vaccine hesitancy is for Pharmaceutical companies to create better vaccines. Ones which are actually safe, effective and necessary. Products they will stand behind and accept liability for. Vaccine hesitancy exists because the products are shit. People are Not idiots. Eventually, they figure it out. And as long as the general public continues to blame people like me, we probably aren’t going to get any improvements.
And that’s a shame.
Thank you for this article. I read this commentary and felt similarly. It reminded me of the moment in early 2022 when our head of infectious disease, at an employee “town hall”, recommended the covid vaccine for pregnant women. He literally said “the vaccine is safe for pregnant women”. After one year of use in humans???? This is someone who I previously thought was intelligent and understood nuance, i couldnt believe my ears. That was the moment I lost faith.
Your last paragraph sums up the problem they have created.
Lets get real. There is no reliable "data" on the phantom called Covid. This is an "in silico" genome selected out of millions that were generated from several short nucleotide chains found in the secretions of one patient suffering from pneumonia. Anyone can find the initial study by searching Wuhan novel virus. The incidence of "cases" is completely fraudulent. PCR is not a test---it is a laboratory procedure. Antibody tests are notoriously unreliable due to frequent cross reactions and other problems. And that is before we even consider the massive mislabeling of upper respiratory infections as Covid in hospitals that were openly bribed to do so. Anyone who believes in asymptomatic respiratory infections is really wandering out somewhere in fantasy land. To top it off, the entire scenario was clearly laid out in Event 201 in October 2019. Look at it before it gets scrubbed from the internet.
your only comment on the covid vaccines is they are known to be safe? Nor any comment on the revolving door that is the FDA? I am disappointed
I agree that Mark’ and co are refusing to see the elephant. But there are two elephants. The first is to provide peer reviewed RCT’s for their efficacy claims and for their safety claims. The second elephant is to recognize and take ownership of their many mistakes. These have been many and continuous. Get vaccinated with 2 shots and...
- you won’t get sick
- you won’t die
- you won’t infect your grandmother
- unvaxed people are therefor bad
- natural immunity is poor
- the vaccine is completely safe for everyone
- delta is the endgame. No more variants
Clearly they have been winging it and practicing by gosh, by golly science. But are they going to “own” this string of incompetence? Nope. So when can trust be regained?
The emergence of Omicron was completely unexpected by (almost) all of the community and now, last time I checked, we had 22 variants circulating in NA, none of which were XBB, but the booster i was being asked (pushed) to take was based on XBB. When I went in for my influenza shot, would I ask to get an out of date shot from last year for an influenza variant that no longer existed? No, that would be stupid. So, does that mean the FDA is stupid or just desperate and intractable? Hmmmm. Can’t build trust here.
Maybe I can find one peer reviewed RCT to help me overcome my now extreme skepticism of the FDA. Ahhhh, nope. Not a single one.
What about my anecdotal experience?
Half my extended family is vaccinated and half is not. We have all had delta and omicron. There has been no discernible difference in outcomes even though our ages span 5 year olds up to 68 year olds. Huh.
We don’t know anyone, in over 3 years, that has died or been hospitalized due to covid (luckily). However, I personally know three people that had very serious covid vaccine injuries. That’s a bad ratio so I certainly can’t garner any confidence here. What is the net benefit vs risk? Not looking good from this perspective.
I see data that shows a high percentage of those dying from covid have been vaccinated. Hmmmm.
I see the latest data showing higher hospitalization rates for those vaccinated, but the data looks very conflicted. Hmmmm. Who is right?
We clearly need much more time and research to sort out the true benefit or not, of these novel vaccine. The end game seems a long way away, but at this point, based on the slow progression of research, it is going decidedly against the FDA.
So my conclusion is that the FDA hasn’t shot itself in the foot, but instead in the temple.
Recovery in trust can only happen when the FDA directors are fired.
In debate and in efforts of persuasion, it has often been said that to lose the language is to lose the argument. We have been losing the argument on these Covid genetic drug jabs by using the term vaccine when referring to them. They are genetic drugs and should have gone through the FDA approval process reserved for pharmaceuticals, and specifically for genetic drugs, rather than the more lax process reserved for vaccines. Look at the pharmacokinetics of these drugs: Dose, distribution, duration. The 30 or 100 mics (or much less depending on lot #, vial mishandling and/or manufacturing variability) put in the shoulder is a pro-drug, meaning it must lead to a different substance that is the biologic agent (spike protein) to which the immune system reacts. So what is the DOSE of the spike protein ultimately produced in your body? Who knows? Could be billions, could be trillions, might be none at all. They lied to us on the DISTRIBUTION - doesn’t just stay in the shoulder, it goes everywhere. And what is the DURATION of action? Historical and traditional vaccines stay in the shoulder and the known quantity of protein degrades in a few days. “Vaccine” induced spike protein has been found in the body months after receiving an injection. And now we are learning about mRNA “frame shifting” where foreign proteins other than the spike protein are being produced by our ribosomes in cells transfected with this pro-drug. To call all this genetic complexity a vaccine is propaganda that provides these drugs an innocence connotation they have not earned and do not deserve. More detail is here: https://jackcaskinsmd.substack.com/p/the-duplicitous-design-of-dose-distribution
This is my wife's story and it is still going on. She has been an allergic person all her life. After having our second child she could not tolerate bananas, potatoes, and cherries. The cherries brought on a pretty severe bronchospasm. These symptoms disappeared after about two years. Now in her seventies she cannot tolerate dairy and has some nasal symptoms.
She had the first shot and second Moderna Vaccine and then we went back for the first booster. Three days after the booster she developed a dermatologic rash of macropapules and atopic area just about all over her body with the worst areas on her chest and back. The Dermatologists didn't know what to make of it but when we suggested maybe a reaction to Covid vaccine they didn't buy in. I did a literature search at the NIH website PubMed and found a very lengthy paper complete with picture that looked exactly like my wife's rash. The authors talked about possible Long Covid.
After about 6 months the rash just cleared up with Pramoxine cream and Triamcinolone 1%. No help from antihistamines.
Then Omicron came along and we both got it. Very mild flu like symptoms. Easy peasy, glad we got the shot. But after two weeks my wife broke out with a redish rash and severe urticaria. Slightly raised itchy areas pretty much over the same area as before. The itching was so bad she was in tears. The Pramoxine cream (Cera-Ve) was helpful but sometimes only lasted for an hour. Went back to Triamcinolone which she used for a month or so and then we tried Hydrocortisone 1% which, oila ,worked as well.
The itching has interferred with her sleep and we have gone through pounds of cream but she is better. Scratching has caused capillary bleeding which clears up after a few days. Dealing with this Long Covid has also depressed her on some days but overall she has continued to exercise and eat well. Her Gp says no more Covid shots. I have found 7 studies that call these skin reactions the result of Covid. I think there are more.
Lately she has had cream free days and the rash has pretty much disappeared. We worry that if she gets Covid again that she will react badly again but we are thankful that the worst is over.
Pick a vaccine. Any vaccine. Click on it to go to the insert. Scroll down to section “6.2 Post Marketing Experience”. Look under “Immune System Disorders” or “Skin and Subcutaneous Tissue Disorders”. You’ll find Pruritas, Urticaria and skin rash listed as an adverse reaction on Every. Single. Vaccine Insert. Including CoVid 19 vaccines.
https://www.vaccinesafety.edu/package-inserts-and-manufacturers-for-some-us-licensed-vaccines-and-immunoglobulins/
Yes no argument there. But never expected 2 years of macropapules facial rash, incredible itching that was almost constant with interruption of sleep and fever, cough and hot one minute and cold the next. No one was writing about this and the Derms had no clue until well into the pandemic when articles began to appear. Evidently there is a difference in the types of vaccines that cause these skin problems and it would be good to know more about that. The good news is that it seems that my wife's immune system is winning the battle after two years of pramoxine lotions and low potency steroids. I still believe in vaccines but we need to know all the risks.
I’m so glad your wife is getting better. Many well wishes.
Why is there not detailed information available to us on the people they claim are dying of/with(?) Covid currently. Age? Comorbidities? How many Covid shots? Was Covid an incidental finding or direct cause of death? This information would go a long way toward rebuilding trust and allow us, as physicians, to give some kind of informed consent/recommendations to our patients when they ask whether they should get yet another Covid shot. At this point I don’t know what our public health goal is when I see patients of every status - no Covid vax, natural immunity, hybrid immunity, multi-vax with 1st episode of Covid - all doing well with infection with this version of Covid. The recommendations currently coming from our agencies simply do not make sense to those of us with boots on the ground who have cared for thousands of patients with Covid. If physicians can’t trust what they say, then we have no hope until there is a major regime change.
Well said by Dr. Cifu.
It’s not “1 size fits all”.
There are some vaccines where “reasonable people” would NOT disagree about the balance of benefit vs risk.
And there are vaccines where “reasonable people” WOULD disagree.
To lament falling vaccination rates in general without acknowledging that reality is an abdication of duty.
To win back (at least some of) the doubters, it might help to at least speak to that reality.
Another reason so many people don't trust public health is the revisionist definition of a vaccine. Prior to COVID there was a general understanding that a vaccine was sterilizing; i.e., if you got a vaccine for smallpox, you didn't get smallpox. When you got your flu shot, it was called a flu shot, not a flu vaccine. I always assumed, as I believe most people did, that it is called a flu shot because it is not sterilizing.
If you recall, the CDC changed the definition of a "vaccine" after the "COVID-19 vaccines" were rolled out and found not to be sterilizing. IMHO, because the CDC tried to be clever and use the trust we all had for vaccines to promote a "COVID prophylactic" as a "COVID vaccine" which we can all see is a completely ineffective "vaccine" (as in sterilizing), the word "vaccine" no longer has the connotation of "effective".
Long winded way of saying, the government destroyed the trust we all had in shots called vaccines.
For example, in this computer model Dr Cifu cites there are all sorts of parameters that are CRITICAL to the accuracy of the models predictions such as vaccine effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness duration, and virus transmission rates which are likely highly unreliable given the failure of our public health apparatus to properly implement studies during the pandemic. Nevermind competing questions of vaccine injury and harm... also not adequately studied.
"Trying to convince all people that all vaccines are the same is not the way to raise vaccination rates, garner trust, or improve public health." 100% spot on. This starts out as intellectually dishonest, people can tell, and they won't trust you. All of the rhetoric starts out as dishonest. The best science communication is in simply stating the facts as clearly as possible, including the huge unknowns. There is no way to dumb things down and be honest (by either inclusion or omission) at the same time.
“Though I am convinced of the safety of the COVID vaccine and know that the initial series saved millions of lives.”
Thank you for a reference, Dr Cifu, but a computer model doesn’t prove anything unless it has been thoroughly validated against real world data.
What would be better evidence for this claim would be an RCT comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated populations to extrapolate from.
Perhaps this is discussed in the modeling paper?
Exactly. Computer models predicting COVID deaths were wildly, laughably inaccurate. Why on earth would you believe computer models showing vaccines saved millions of lives? And is this millions of lives in the US with a population of 330M, or in the world, with a population of 8B?
I am still dumbfounded by the lack of owning of errors and short memory these folks have. The damage done to all of our trust in institutions I have turned to for educated, science based help is forever damaged. I am to the point my knee jerk reaction to any "scientific facts" I hear in the public health realm is.... "ok what is their angle, and how are they trying to manipulate me"
I found the comments after the article quite interesting. A Dr De Maria wrote "Their choice of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccination as an example of successful protection falls short of reinforcing the bond of trust that needs to be fostered" Wow how true.....
I think at least a generation of medical progress has been lost, maybe more.
Adam, vaccines are not "safe and effective" just like there is no "safe sex". Some vaccines are safer than others. Some vaccines are more effective than others. But all of them have side effects that have permanently injured kids and adults. There's a reason the pharma companies demanded liability from injury and the 1986 Vaccine Injury Act was passed - they knew that unlike most other medications, they would take a loss on vaccines if they had to cover damages, especially to kids.
Let that sink in: If Pharma refuses to stand behind it's own products - if it thinks they're so dangerous that they will cause financial losses, why should I take them, let alone give them to my kids??? I will believe that vaccines are "safe enough" when Pharma actually puts their money where their mouth is.
Nice summary. I had similar reaction to the Viewpoint. Gov’t health leaders created this disastrous damage to public trust in vaccines and public health in general. Now they are telling busy front-line doctors like yourself to clean up their mess.