The "not-so-bombshell" Pfizer Interview

Finally stating the obvious

“My vaccine protects you. Your vaccine protects me. #SCIENCE #WECANDOTHIS.” That was the narrative driving all the vaccine mandates. Now, the story hitting the airwaves is this blockbuster interview, in which a Pfizer executive admits that they never really tested the COVID mRNA vaccines for their ability to stop transmission before rolling them out. Many of those who fought the mandates are rejoicing at this admission, but I think it is essential that people understand this is not a BOOM-GOTCHA moment. This is another “of course” moment. Is it really a surprise that Pfizer, Moderna, et al., didn’t examine whether the vaccine prevented transmission? Absolutely not. Ask yourself: HOW WOULD YOU DO THAT? The answer is you can’t run a clinical trial to test that. I’m so tired of this circular argument in which, on one side, the public health authoritarians put out a narrative and force everyone to believe it or else they are anti-science sociopaths that want to kill their elderly neighbor; and, on the flip side, people want to find this proof positive that those authoritarians are part of an evil conspiracy  to kill citizens with a deadly injection. The COVID vaccines offer more risks than benefits for some, more benefits than risk for others, and are pretty much a wash in terms of risk for most.  The big scandal isn’t that they didn’t “test vaccines for transmission prevention”. The big scandal is that they pretended that the main purpose of a vaccination is societal protection and not individual protection. The big scandal is they deliberately confused the public on the fact that preventing transmission is dependent upon preventing infection. The big scandal is they used this misrepresentation of the truth to coerce people into a medical intervention they did not need; as a result, any young people who suffered side effects did so for no defensible reason. As for their motivations, the public health establishment attracts people that truly want to help others and it attracts people that are self-important authoritarians. The latter tended to dominate the former the last few years.  The main problem is that we should not be forced to accept refrigerator magnet mantras as science and obey unelected public health bureaucrats-EVER. For that reason, it’s good Pfizer was forced to admit the obvious. Hopefully the public health bureaucrats will follow.

Why do I say that this admission is not news, and that no one should have EVER thought they tested the vaccines for “transmission prevention”? For one thing, I have never heard of a clinical trial that looked at transmission as an outcome. Conclusions about vaccines preventing transmission are based on assumptions and epidemiological studies. You can’t do epidemiological studies until you have the vaccine out there in the population. And the epidemiological studies are ALWAYS correlation, not demonstrations of cause and effect. Epidemiological studies that followed in the years after the initial roll-out of the COVID vaccines tried to draw correlations between vaccination rates, COVID cases and COVID deaths. The results were relatively mixed, although there was a trend in some demographics suggesting vaccination rates reduced both COVID cases and deaths from COVID. That is to be expected if the vaccine is causing the production of antibodies against viral coat proteins. At the same time, plenty of unvaccinated people were NOT dying from COVID and this was not a game-changer for the majority of healthy, young individuals.

The original clinical trial looked at “adverse events” and “efficacy”, something I talked about in an earlier article. In summary, they looked at 21,720 participants who received the BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine and 21,728 who received placebo; after 2 months, 8 participants (0.037%) who received the vaccine tested positive for COVID-19, compared to 162 (0.75%) in the placebo group. Even though infections were low in both groups, they were still significantly lower in the vaccine group; thus, they concluded 95% efficacy. I have no issue with this trial being used to offer the vaccine to those who wanted it. That is very different from using these data to force everyone to get it.

Let’s deconstruct this situation a little bit.  Before we even think about how we would prove experimentally that a vaccine prevents transmission, we need to address what this “your vaccine protects me” mantra implies. When you hear that, does it create a poorly-defined impression in your mind that the vaccine can do something to prevent a person who ISN’T infected from spreading the virus? I think, for some people, it does. But you can’t spread something you don’t have; what they are really trying to imply is that you don’t KNOW if you have it and, if you’re vaccinated, you are less likely to get it and spread it.  Does that mean if you DO have COVID AND you’re vaccinated you are less likely to spread it? Or does it mean that, if you’re vaccinated, you’re less likely to get it and, thus, less likely to spread it? The answer for most vaccines is-a little bit of both. Most vaccines interfere with the virus’s ability to enter cells (and thus infect you) and with its ability to survive and replicate in your cells. This translates into you being less likely to get infected, and less likely to have a severe infection if you do get infected (and asymptomatic transmission is not a major contributor to spread outside of prolonged, close contacts). Remember, all the vaccine does is trigger the production of antibodies to the spike protein. The antibodies don’t prevent you from transmitting the virus on their own. If the vaccine is not effectively preventing you from getting infected, but is still limiting disease progression, it may still reduce transmission but not as effectively as if would if you were not getting infected. If it isn’t doing either one, it isn’t preventing transmission at all. There exists no state in which you are infected, running a fever and coughing all over grandma, but are somehow not able to transmit the virus. If the vaccine does work, your chances of becoming infected and severely ill are reduced and it doesn’t matter if someone around you isn’t vaccinated. From day one of this vaccine craze, I have been screaming that the purpose of a vaccine is to prevent the individual from getting infected and becoming severely ill, and that is the outcome that the initial clinical trials examined—because that has ALWAYS been the point of a vaccine. The idea that you’re doing it for someone else is the manipulative BS that the public health authoritarians were feeding everyone.

So that we can understand WHY they didn’t look at transmission in the clinical trials, let’s talk about how you would do that experiment in the first place. You could take two groups of subjects, administer vaccine to one and placebo to the other, and then perform extensive contact tracing over a period of time and identify as many contacts of each subject as possible. Then, you could test all of the contacts and determine whether there was a significant difference in the appearance of COVID infections between those that contacted only the vaccinated subjects and those that had contact with the unvaccinated subjects. You’d have to test both of your initial subject groups regularly and have them keep records of any COVID-like symptoms. You would also have to somehow account for who else the contacts might be exposed to. This would be nearly impossible to do and there would be a giant mess of confounding variables. You could take vaccinated and unvaccinated subjects, infect them both with SARSCoV2 and expose a second group of subjects to one group or the other, keeping everyone under quarantine for the duration of the experiment.  No one would approve that study-that’s insane. In other words, OF COURSE they didn’t test for the ability of the vaccine to prevent transmission prior to rolling it out. This is NOT NEWS. Far more important than getting Pfizer to admit they didn’t test for transmission would be getting the entire public health establishment to admit that this isn’t what vaccines are supposed to do. They are designed to protect the vaccinated individual, and everyone should always have been allowed to decide whether or not they want to get the jab.