"3. Effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines
There were public declarations of greater than 90 per cent effectiveness for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Unfortunately,
Pfizer did not publicly disclose the fact that there were large numbers of suspected, but unconfirmed cases of COVID-19 that were excluded from their calculation of efficacy. This was revealed in a summary report issued by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Re-analysis of the data with this new information accounted for was performed by the associate editor of the British Medical Journal, who reported his non-peer-reviewed findings in the journal’s opinion column.
His estimate suggests the true effectiveness of the vaccine might be as low as 19 to 29 per cent. This can’t be confirmed or refuted until raw data not included in the FDA report are released."
https://theconversation.com/5-factors-that-could-dictate-the-success-or-failure-of-the-covid-19-vaccine-rollout-152856"“Suspected covid-19”
All attention has focused on the dramatic efficacy results:
Pfizer reported 170 PCR confirmed covid-19 cases, split 8 to 162 between vaccine and placebo groups. But these numbers were dwarfed by a category of disease called “suspected covid-19”—those with symptomatic covid-19 that were not PCR confirmed.
According to FDA’s report on Pfizer’s vaccine, there were “3410 total cases of suspected, but unconfirmed covid-19 in the overall study population,
1594 occurred in the vaccine group vs. 1816 in the placebo group.”
With 20 times more suspected than confirmed cases, this category of disease cannot be ignored simply because there was no positive PCR test result. Indeed this makes it all the more urgent to understand.
A rough estimate of vaccine efficacy against developing covid-19 symptoms, with or without a positive PCR test result,
would be a relative risk reduction of 19% (see footnote)—far below the 50% effectiveness threshold for authorization set by regulators. Even after removing cases occurring within 7 days of vaccination (409 on Pfizer’s vaccine vs. 287 on placebo), which should include the majority of symptoms due to short-term vaccine reactogenicity, vaccine efficacy remains low: 29% (see footnote)."
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/01/04/peter-doshi-pfizer-and-modernas-95-effective-vaccines-we-need-more-details-and-the-raw-data/Yet at the same time these narrowly focused spike protein vaccines could be handily training the virus in how to get around the vaccines thereby creating harder to manage variants.
https://www.covid-19forum.org/index.php?topic=719.0
