Here's a response to that paper
https://osf.io/m58yh/follow-up paper discussing the article and the problem of rebuttals and retractions in general
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12015-022-10465-2article discussing some of the issues with it
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/scientific-review-articles-as-antivaccine-disinformation/the article is described as "almost entirely speculative". it is not a data point, because it has no data.
kind of demonstrates the problem. most people are frankly not capable of reading technical literature outside of their own field. i include myself in that group. i did some research and have several friends who are doctors and married one, and wound up being interested in medical research, or really scientific research in general...but i still bounce my understanding off of people who really understand this stuff. if you want to talk about turbomachinery design or polymer thin films i can speak from my own direct understanding, but not here. here i have to rely on the expertise of others.
the challenge for us normal people then becomes one of selecting good, trusted sources. this is a skill in and of itself - and it seems like most people are really bad at it. they're subject to all manner of biases (again i include myself in this) but in general are not willing to do the leg work to guard against these biases (i do not include myself here as i make a point to do this, which im sure is ultimately imperfect). it takes practice, and in the end it's an exercise guaranteed to fail
there's a really fun read about this challenge here. i strongly recommend anyone even remotely interested in research to read it... or really anyone, because its funny and interesting.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/28/the-control-group-is-out-of-control/i wrote all that to tell you that if you were an expert in the field, i suspect that article would not seem trustworthy. i don't think peter mccullough is a good, trusted source. normally it wouldn't matter who publishes a work as it would be based on a repeatable experiment - a trial or a test. but this article is just speculation, so we really can only judge it by the plausibility of the speculation, the tightness of the argument, and the reliability of the speculator. i think this fails on all three.
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Effective? Maybe for some at risk. Not for the young who had virtually no risk yet the lie is the demand that those at no risk get vaxxed on the premise it would protect them and protect others who might be at risk when it did no such thing as it does not prevent transmission.
efficacy is a scientific term that is used - objectively - to compare outcomes between a control group and a test group. for vaccines its generally presented as an odds ratio, like you are x more times likely to get this without the vaccine, or a percentage saying the same - if 100 people are in a group and have this, x% will be vaccinated.
good studies get efficacy numbers that generate useful predictions outside of the study. so for example if a study that watched people jump out of an airplane with and without parachutes found a safety benefit to a parachute, we could assume that a parachute helps with any kind of fall. if it didn't find that effect -
because the plane was on the ground - we really don't learn anything from it.
the studies done for covid vaccines have been massive in scope and number, and they have found all kinds of risk reduction. the sheer number and quality of the studies tells us these results are at a minimum directionally right. there's also been thousands and thousands of studies on the risk of covid, and while there is a very low absolute risk for healthy young people, it's not zero. ultimately there
is a risk reduction associated with the vaccines in relative terms; in absolute terms its a very small benefit for some, and a very large benefit for others.
even further, contrary to common opinion on this forum, the vaccines actually
do prevent infection and subsequent transmission. here's a couple of studies that looked at this.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01548-7https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4292https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2116597part of the problem is the disconnect between how people were tested (nose swab PCR) vs how efficacy was measured in the vaccine trials (symptomatic disease). part of the problem was the fact that there's a range of infection based on how many PCR cycles you need - how much virus is actually in your nose. and part of it is that the vaccine efficacy does decline over time, and definitely is reduced against the subsequent variants. but that efficacy change isn't uniform - it does a comparatively worse job at preventing local infection in your nose (PCR positive) than it does at preventing symptomatic infection than it does at preventing severe infection, which it continues to do well.
so i still say the vaccines were effective at preventing severe disease - and still are. they're more effective than some of the other vaccines in our schedules like the flu vaccine, and take fewer doses to get to those efficacy numbers than some vaccines kids get routinely.
if it hadn't become a contentious political issue by the sheer stupidity of the USG and complete cowardice to weaponize the general duty clause of OSHA people would be far less likely to have their opinions on the safety of a medical product align with their party politics. on the face of it that seems absurd.
