I need to more carefully to read my comments before posting. I misstated one statement. Again, my apologies. I meant that the vaccine and boosters have reduced hospitalizations of our general population. Most hospitalizations are patients with significant co-morbiditiies or immunosuppressed. I have been told that some hospitalized patients have not received the vaccine, but others have. As we know, there is no such thing as 0 or 100%. But I will take a reduction any day when the benefit is more than the cost. I bet with the odds, not against them. Although sometimes the lower probability wins.
I forgot to add there are several studies with good research design and are well analyzed that have found the COVID vaccine and subsequent boosters decrease the incidence of hospitalization among people who do have significant co-morbidities or are on immunosuppressive meds. As a physician and front line worker, I will get my new COVID and flu vaccine next Tuesday. Given my health, I may have no symptoms if I get COVID and inadvertently expose my vulnerable patients to severe injury. My apologies for not mentioning this in my first post.
A senior hospital leader of a large healthcare system once told me, they only care if people that get COVID (or flu) require hospitalization or die from the disease. To paraphrase Carvel "It's the hospitalization, stupid."
Basic flaw. The entire issue was politicized. Red team vs blue team. And all debate was stifled.
Sensible medicine?
If you get these immunizations you are fully protected. MMR, Polio, Dt boosters, Hepatitis A and B. Flu vaccine offers scant protection. And same with all these m-RNA vaccines. Why is the Pfizer vaccine so much better than all the rest?
It's just "Sensible"
You get 3 boosters and still contract Covid more than once. Logically what do you conclude? Logically and empirically.
Then California passed a draconian law "outlawing" any dissent or debate.
In medicine our first question should always be, "does this make sense?"
One could argue that the bivalent vaccine is basically the same kind of vaccine as the monovalent and was approved like the annual influenza vaccine is released without clinical trial. However, the two options are not mutually exclusively. This bivalent vaccine should have been released, in my opinion, with the proviso that a controlled trial of vulnerable patients (like the nursing home study proposed above) would need to play out over 3 to 6 months to know its efficacy. There should have been a statement that there should be mandates for low risk populations.
Hello, I am really enjoying learning and listening to your shows. I am wondering if you can reach out to me if you know anything about covid 19 vaccine status and organ transplantation. Is it possible that organs can be denied (i.e. Kidney) based on someone not having the vaccine? I am an RN in critical care. I am just wondering your knowledge of this. Feel free to email me at jsmythe.rn@gmail.com.
I never felt other than nervous about the selection of our current Director down at CDC. But I am biased because during my years of committee service with CDC in Atlanta Julie G. was the Boss. And I thought of her very often as our current pandemic picked up speed and CDC began fairly promptly to operate like an old 1973 Pontiac with bad tires, one missing headlight, no muffler, and a large oil leak. Julie would have done things very differently, let's leave it at that. There would have been firm actions, very tight public communication processes, and zero weasel-wording.
Sure seems to me that Vinay has certainly stepped in the dog pooh with his assertion that Rochelle having COVID despite getting bivalent booster a few weeks ago shows that vaccination "does not work". What nonsense from a supposedly credentialed and seasoned biostatistics guy! Even if our vaccination program had proven 98.54 percent efficacy for preventing transmission, based on some air-tight rigorous clinical trials, one person developing COVID after vaccination would prove *absolutely nothing*. Just like one NON-vaccinated person NEVER developing COVID could not establish or even raise doubts about the effect of the vaccines.
I do share Dr. Prasad's dismay regarding the fact that neither Pfizer nor Moderna has by now paid for huge, solid, spic-and-span, take-no-prisoners randomized clinical tests of the mRNA vaccines. But I'm equally dismayed that Vinay is arrogantly (?) or carelessly (?) staying with his signature pattern of obviously not proof-reading his own postings before hitting the Send button.
So many people have already had the shots, that it would be difficult at this point, likely impossible, to round up enough people to do a randomized controlled trial with half getting shots and half getting a placebo. There actually was a placebo group in the first place but after a very few weeks, they decided to just go ahead and give the shot to everyone in the placebo group - making it impossible to do long term safety studies. It's possible they did it this way because they were counting on EUA and perhaps never having to complete a true randomized controlled trial. And maybe they didn't want to have people take a look at long-term safety data?
There has been so much myocarditis and other serious adverse effects that at least at least 7 different European countries have limited use of the vaccines for children and younger people. Denmark has recently said that they will not offer boosters to anyone under 50, though apparently if there is some reason that someone younger than that really, really wants it they can obtain it - but it's not "offered." Other countries have put age limits on the vaccine, with 30 and older being eligible for vaccines, or in one country at least 18 years - though other than Denmark, I'm not able to find the source, though I just read it this week - I just can't find the article to clarify what countries or all the particulars. But, around the world, people do have concerns about the safety signals and apparently thinking that for children and younger adults, the risk outweighs the potential benefits.
Here in the US, it's known that the survivability of Covid for children ages 0-19 is 99.997% per CDC data, meaning the chance of a child getting Covid and actually dying from it is miniscule. A new paper out in pre-print has examined more recent data and shows the fatality rate for children is 0.0003, yes, apparently 3 in 10,000. I have also heard testimony given at a state legislative hearing that they only children known to have died from Covid already had a serious disease like cancer, then got Covid and died - no healthy child has gotten Covid and died to the best of my knowledge or this was true during the worst of pandemic at any rate.
But on the other hand, just for children ages 5 - 11 years, as of October 7, 2022, the VAERS data shows there were 14,622 reports of adverse events including 692 rated as serious, and 29 reported deaths – just in this one age group. There have been more deaths than only 29, considering older kids and adults. With most pharma drugs being investigated, trials would have been halted with many fewer deaths. Normally, only a few deaths would require at least a time out to try to figure out the reasons for the deaths. The data safety monitoring board at any time in the past would have stopped a clinical trial long before the number of deaths that have been reported with the mRNA vaccines.
But now – the holdouts who didn’t get the vaccine right away, as they look at data from around the world, can see that there are way too many adverse events, too many risks, too many unanswered questions. I don’t know how you would find enough people willing to voluntarily take the shot to be compared with an equal number of people who didn’t get the shots who now decide they want the shots after all. It’s too late, and the vaccine manufacturers planned it this way. I doubt you could find enough nursing home patients to enroll in a new trial, as so many died without treatment when the pandemic was at its worst, and by now surely most of them have had the vaccine. Clinical trials would have been a great idea, but the time is past.
In any case, for many countries in the world, it has become pretty clear that the vaccines are not effective, and there are a truly frightening number of side effects. Other countries can see from population data that in heavily vaxxed areas, people continue to contract Covid and even repeated cases of Covid, besides the side effects. Some countries are concluding that the mRNA data is not really a solution.
Most Americans would know a lot more about the harmful effects of the vaccines and the true lack of efficacy but for the fierce censorship of physicians who have tried to present facts that don’t match the pharma narrative. Right now, the State of Missouri has a lawsuit against the Biden Administration and his top officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to “censor and suppress free speech” of physicians and other concerning Covid.
In addition, I learned today that Pfizer had paid $50K to a PR firm whose PR staff were “embedded” in the CDC in divisions related to viruses and vaccines. Corruption much? My impression is that Pfizer has been running the show and the CDC and FDA fall in line. In the book, The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F Kennedy, Jr., he calls this "regulatory capture on steroids." The book is worth reading, and now there is a documentary online by the same title - free for the next several days, or for purchase. I think just google it or get the book on Amazon. Link below is about the lawsuit & Fauci having to testify about the censorship.
Wow, what a blistering commentary. Our good Dr VP has identified the huge misjudgments and lack of rigor free of the political lens. Will it matter? It appears that the NIH is not listening to anybody outside of their very small circle. There really ought to be hell to pay but it's more likely we will see more damage because they are stubborn fools.
We await the new Congress and the oversight urgently needed months ago. .
Same thing happened to my brother. Got the bivalent, got Covid a few weeks later! There are studies showing it makes your susceptible ….definitely seems to weaken your immune system for some length of time after.
My family of 5 (with 3 kids under six) finally got Covid for the first time 2 weeks ago. I’m the only one still congested and fatigued. I’m also the only one that was vaccinated. Covid sucks and I would probably take Paxlovid if I had to do it again. Absolutely no interest in the bivalent booster for myself or my kids at this time.
Would love to hear more about the efficacy of the flu vaccine. My 3 year old has asthma.
Hypothesis, evidence, and conclusion by HCQ skeptics:
1) 12 randomized controlled trials of HCQ where it was given after the body had already cleared virus proves that HCQ doesn't work. Yes, they are saying that giving an antiviral after a virus has been cleared by the immune system is an adequate test of the antiviral.
2) Since these were RCTs, they are better evidence than retrospective studies that studied early treatment with HCQ.
The HCQ skeptic position is rather like a RCT of parachutes where someone pulls the ripcord after the parachutist has already impacted. There is a window of time in free fall where a parachute may be life-saving.
So the HCQ skeptic position is that time to treatment is irrelevant. But do they really understand covid, including its early stage? Have they thought about preventing progression or the time to max viral load and whether it's optimal to treat high risk patients before max viral load occurs in other patients with mild covid in order to limit damage? I question their understanding of covid outside of the cases where it has progressed, which is where covid is treated in hospitals.
This just in.......vaccines & boosters should keep you from getting covid or the CDC will be considered a failure. Same with flu vaccines, they are now supposed to prevent you from getting the flu, if not we have been fooled once again by the CDC. "It's time to be honest about bad evidence." Sure
I need to more carefully to read my comments before posting. I misstated one statement. Again, my apologies. I meant that the vaccine and boosters have reduced hospitalizations of our general population. Most hospitalizations are patients with significant co-morbiditiies or immunosuppressed. I have been told that some hospitalized patients have not received the vaccine, but others have. As we know, there is no such thing as 0 or 100%. But I will take a reduction any day when the benefit is more than the cost. I bet with the odds, not against them. Although sometimes the lower probability wins.
I forgot to add there are several studies with good research design and are well analyzed that have found the COVID vaccine and subsequent boosters decrease the incidence of hospitalization among people who do have significant co-morbidities or are on immunosuppressive meds. As a physician and front line worker, I will get my new COVID and flu vaccine next Tuesday. Given my health, I may have no symptoms if I get COVID and inadvertently expose my vulnerable patients to severe injury. My apologies for not mentioning this in my first post.
A senior hospital leader of a large healthcare system once told me, they only care if people that get COVID (or flu) require hospitalization or die from the disease. To paraphrase Carvel "It's the hospitalization, stupid."
Basic flaw. The entire issue was politicized. Red team vs blue team. And all debate was stifled.
Sensible medicine?
If you get these immunizations you are fully protected. MMR, Polio, Dt boosters, Hepatitis A and B. Flu vaccine offers scant protection. And same with all these m-RNA vaccines. Why is the Pfizer vaccine so much better than all the rest?
It's just "Sensible"
You get 3 boosters and still contract Covid more than once. Logically what do you conclude? Logically and empirically.
Then California passed a draconian law "outlawing" any dissent or debate.
In medicine our first question should always be, "does this make sense?"
One could argue that the bivalent vaccine is basically the same kind of vaccine as the monovalent and was approved like the annual influenza vaccine is released without clinical trial. However, the two options are not mutually exclusively. This bivalent vaccine should have been released, in my opinion, with the proviso that a controlled trial of vulnerable patients (like the nursing home study proposed above) would need to play out over 3 to 6 months to know its efficacy. There should have been a statement that there should be mandates for low risk populations.
Hello, I am really enjoying learning and listening to your shows. I am wondering if you can reach out to me if you know anything about covid 19 vaccine status and organ transplantation. Is it possible that organs can be denied (i.e. Kidney) based on someone not having the vaccine? I am an RN in critical care. I am just wondering your knowledge of this. Feel free to email me at jsmythe.rn@gmail.com.
Thanks,
Jillian
I never felt other than nervous about the selection of our current Director down at CDC. But I am biased because during my years of committee service with CDC in Atlanta Julie G. was the Boss. And I thought of her very often as our current pandemic picked up speed and CDC began fairly promptly to operate like an old 1973 Pontiac with bad tires, one missing headlight, no muffler, and a large oil leak. Julie would have done things very differently, let's leave it at that. There would have been firm actions, very tight public communication processes, and zero weasel-wording.
Sure seems to me that Vinay has certainly stepped in the dog pooh with his assertion that Rochelle having COVID despite getting bivalent booster a few weeks ago shows that vaccination "does not work". What nonsense from a supposedly credentialed and seasoned biostatistics guy! Even if our vaccination program had proven 98.54 percent efficacy for preventing transmission, based on some air-tight rigorous clinical trials, one person developing COVID after vaccination would prove *absolutely nothing*. Just like one NON-vaccinated person NEVER developing COVID could not establish or even raise doubts about the effect of the vaccines.
I do share Dr. Prasad's dismay regarding the fact that neither Pfizer nor Moderna has by now paid for huge, solid, spic-and-span, take-no-prisoners randomized clinical tests of the mRNA vaccines. But I'm equally dismayed that Vinay is arrogantly (?) or carelessly (?) staying with his signature pattern of obviously not proof-reading his own postings before hitting the Send button.
Bravo sir! Very well said.
So many people have already had the shots, that it would be difficult at this point, likely impossible, to round up enough people to do a randomized controlled trial with half getting shots and half getting a placebo. There actually was a placebo group in the first place but after a very few weeks, they decided to just go ahead and give the shot to everyone in the placebo group - making it impossible to do long term safety studies. It's possible they did it this way because they were counting on EUA and perhaps never having to complete a true randomized controlled trial. And maybe they didn't want to have people take a look at long-term safety data?
There has been so much myocarditis and other serious adverse effects that at least at least 7 different European countries have limited use of the vaccines for children and younger people. Denmark has recently said that they will not offer boosters to anyone under 50, though apparently if there is some reason that someone younger than that really, really wants it they can obtain it - but it's not "offered." Other countries have put age limits on the vaccine, with 30 and older being eligible for vaccines, or in one country at least 18 years - though other than Denmark, I'm not able to find the source, though I just read it this week - I just can't find the article to clarify what countries or all the particulars. But, around the world, people do have concerns about the safety signals and apparently thinking that for children and younger adults, the risk outweighs the potential benefits.
Here in the US, it's known that the survivability of Covid for children ages 0-19 is 99.997% per CDC data, meaning the chance of a child getting Covid and actually dying from it is miniscule. A new paper out in pre-print has examined more recent data and shows the fatality rate for children is 0.0003, yes, apparently 3 in 10,000. I have also heard testimony given at a state legislative hearing that they only children known to have died from Covid already had a serious disease like cancer, then got Covid and died - no healthy child has gotten Covid and died to the best of my knowledge or this was true during the worst of pandemic at any rate.
But on the other hand, just for children ages 5 - 11 years, as of October 7, 2022, the VAERS data shows there were 14,622 reports of adverse events including 692 rated as serious, and 29 reported deaths – just in this one age group. There have been more deaths than only 29, considering older kids and adults. With most pharma drugs being investigated, trials would have been halted with many fewer deaths. Normally, only a few deaths would require at least a time out to try to figure out the reasons for the deaths. The data safety monitoring board at any time in the past would have stopped a clinical trial long before the number of deaths that have been reported with the mRNA vaccines.
But now – the holdouts who didn’t get the vaccine right away, as they look at data from around the world, can see that there are way too many adverse events, too many risks, too many unanswered questions. I don’t know how you would find enough people willing to voluntarily take the shot to be compared with an equal number of people who didn’t get the shots who now decide they want the shots after all. It’s too late, and the vaccine manufacturers planned it this way. I doubt you could find enough nursing home patients to enroll in a new trial, as so many died without treatment when the pandemic was at its worst, and by now surely most of them have had the vaccine. Clinical trials would have been a great idea, but the time is past.
In any case, for many countries in the world, it has become pretty clear that the vaccines are not effective, and there are a truly frightening number of side effects. Other countries can see from population data that in heavily vaxxed areas, people continue to contract Covid and even repeated cases of Covid, besides the side effects. Some countries are concluding that the mRNA data is not really a solution.
Most Americans would know a lot more about the harmful effects of the vaccines and the true lack of efficacy but for the fierce censorship of physicians who have tried to present facts that don’t match the pharma narrative. Right now, the State of Missouri has a lawsuit against the Biden Administration and his top officials for allegedly colluding with social media giants to “censor and suppress free speech” of physicians and other concerning Covid.
https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2022/05/05/missouri-louisiana-ags-file-suit-against-president-biden-top-admin-officials-for-allegedly-colluding-with-social-media-giants-to-censor-and-suppress-free-speech
Fauci will have to testify. https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/fauci-et-al-fraud-finale
In addition, I learned today that Pfizer had paid $50K to a PR firm whose PR staff were “embedded” in the CDC in divisions related to viruses and vaccines. Corruption much? My impression is that Pfizer has been running the show and the CDC and FDA fall in line. In the book, The Real Anthony Fauci, by Robert F Kennedy, Jr., he calls this "regulatory capture on steroids." The book is worth reading, and now there is a documentary online by the same title - free for the next several days, or for purchase. I think just google it or get the book on Amazon. Link below is about the lawsuit & Fauci having to testify about the censorship.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F97748290-e7e7-4d76-8dbf-a2186d3baddb_964x1191.png
Wow, what a blistering commentary. Our good Dr VP has identified the huge misjudgments and lack of rigor free of the political lens. Will it matter? It appears that the NIH is not listening to anybody outside of their very small circle. There really ought to be hell to pay but it's more likely we will see more damage because they are stubborn fools.
We await the new Congress and the oversight urgently needed months ago. .
Same thing happened to my brother. Got the bivalent, got Covid a few weeks later! There are studies showing it makes your susceptible ….definitely seems to weaken your immune system for some length of time after.
As always. Dr. Prasad is on point.
My family of 5 (with 3 kids under six) finally got Covid for the first time 2 weeks ago. I’m the only one still congested and fatigued. I’m also the only one that was vaccinated. Covid sucks and I would probably take Paxlovid if I had to do it again. Absolutely no interest in the bivalent booster for myself or my kids at this time.
Would love to hear more about the efficacy of the flu vaccine. My 3 year old has asthma.
*** edited
Let's look at the evidence against using HCQ.
Hypothesis, evidence, and conclusion by HCQ skeptics:
1) 12 randomized controlled trials of HCQ where it was given after the body had already cleared virus proves that HCQ doesn't work. Yes, they are saying that giving an antiviral after a virus has been cleared by the immune system is an adequate test of the antiviral.
2) Since these were RCTs, they are better evidence than retrospective studies that studied early treatment with HCQ.
The HCQ skeptic position is rather like a RCT of parachutes where someone pulls the ripcord after the parachutist has already impacted. There is a window of time in free fall where a parachute may be life-saving.
So the HCQ skeptic position is that time to treatment is irrelevant. But do they really understand covid, including its early stage? Have they thought about preventing progression or the time to max viral load and whether it's optimal to treat high risk patients before max viral load occurs in other patients with mild covid in order to limit damage? I question their understanding of covid outside of the cases where it has progressed, which is where covid is treated in hospitals.
The Big Pharma industry along with regulators like FDA have forfeited their right to be trusted by citizens. Here are my thoughts on Big Pharma’s dodgy past and dodgy present: https://open.substack.com/pub/davidthunder/p/if-these-facts-dont-shake-your-faith?r=wlowt&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
This just in.......vaccines & boosters should keep you from getting covid or the CDC will be considered a failure. Same with flu vaccines, they are now supposed to prevent you from getting the flu, if not we have been fooled once again by the CDC. "It's time to be honest about bad evidence." Sure
Raysto
Sadly most of my physician colleagues, well over 90% don't see this yet. Not sure they ever will.