In regard to vaccines they are not being tested for preventing infection or transmission. They are only being tested to see if they less moderate or minor symptoms in those who get the infection.
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Vaccine Trials ‘Can’t Detect’ Virus Risk Reduction: Expert
Excerpts:
Writing in the BMJ medical journal, associate editor Peter Doshi warned that not even phase 3 trials under way in the race for a vaccine can prove their product will prevent people contracting COVID-19.
In a sobering essay, Doshi said those hoping for a breakthrough to end the pandemic would be disappointed, with some vaccines likely to reduce the risk of infection by only 30 percent.
“None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths,” he wrote.
“Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.”
… Doshi, assistant professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, said that even the most advanced trials are evaluating mild rather than severe disease.
And few if any current trials are designed to find out whether there is a benefit among the elderly, a key at-risk constituency.
Without enrolling frail and elderly volunteers in trials in sufficient numbers, Doshi said “there can be little basis for assuming any benefit against hospitalization or mortality.”
He added that children, immunocompromised people and pregnant women had largely been excluded from trials, making it unlikely that the experiments will address key gaps in our understanding of how Covid-19 develops differently among individuals.
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These Coronavirus Trials Don’t Answer the One Question We Need to Know
We may not find out whether the vaccines prevent moderate or severe cases of Covid-19.
According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a vaccine could meet the companies’ benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild Covid-19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death.
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Covid-19 Vaccine Protocols Reveal That Trials Are Designed To Succeed
By William Haseltine (Haseltine was a professor at Harvard Medical School where he founded two research departments on cancer and HIV/AIDS)
Excerpts:
Prevention of infection is not a criterion for success for any of these vaccines. In fact, their endpoints all require confirmed infections and all those they will include in the analysis for success, the only difference being the severity of symptoms between the vaccinated and unvaccinated. Measuring differences amongst only those infected by SARS-CoV-2 underscores the implicit conclusion that the vaccines are not expected to prevent infection, only modify symptoms of those infected….
We all expect an effective vaccine to prevent serious illness if infected. Three of the vaccine protocols—Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca—do not require that their vaccine prevent serious disease only that they prevent moderate symptoms which may be as mild as cough, or headache….
These protocols do not emphasize the most important ramifications of Covid-19 that people are most interested in preventing: overall infection, hospitalization, and death. It boggles the mind and defies common sense that the National Institute of Health, the Center for Disease Control, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, and the rest would consider the approval of a vaccine that would be distributed to hundreds of millions on such slender threads of success.