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No, Covid Vaccines Didn’t Save Millions of Lives, Hospitalizations in United States
One of the most pressing issues facing the scientific and medical communities is the catastrophic loss of the public’s trust in accepting their advice and/or recommendations. And it’s overwhelmingly due to their own actions and statements.
There are books’ worth of examples worth of examples. Such as the early part of the pandemic when they flip-flopped on masks, from claiming that they didn’t work to stating that getting 80% of the public to wear them would end the pandemic in a matter of weeks, to their claims that the lab leak was a racist conspiracy theory, and all the way to absurdities such as predicting the Super Bowl in Florida would be a “superspreader event.”
Or the mass panic when states like Mississippi and Texas ended their mask mandates, or when the mandate on airplanes was lifted…and nothing happened afterward.
But certainly nothing may have damaged their trust more than the steadfast assertions that the COVID vaccines were able to stop infection and transmission. And one study and analysis from a heavily credentialed group of experts on the vaccines shows how committed they were to misleading people in order to suit their political and ideological aims.
U.S. Doctors Warn of a Potentially Bad Year for Tick-Borne Diseases
Tick season seems to be off to a fast start, with an unusually high number of bites already reported across the country. Some U.S. doctors are worried about the potential for a bad year for tick-borne diseases. “If you have a lot of exposures, there will probably be more cases of tick-related infections,” said Dr. Alina Filozov, an infectious disease doctor at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an early advisory to the public this week to guard against ticks. Tick bites typically spike in May, but “the data are telling us now is the time to take action,” said Alison Hinckley, a CDC Lyme disease expert. “Ticks are out and people are getting bitten.” Current data is very limited, but the early signs are not good.
The CDC’s tracking system shows that weekly rates of ER visits for tick bites are the highest for this time of year since 2017. That’s true in all regions of the country, except the south-central United States.
Pfizer’s Paxlovid Speeds Recovery but Fails to Reduce Hospitalizations in Vaccinated Adults
Two large clinical trials suggest that Pfizer’s Paxlovid may shorten recovery time in vaccinated COVID-19 patients but does not significantly reduce hospitalizations or deaths in this population. Published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the findings reflect how treatment effects have shifted in the post-vaccine era.
Together, as reported by UBC, the trials enrolled more than 4,200 participants, over 98 percent of whom were vaccinated. The randomized, pragmatic study designs focused on adults aged 50 and older, or younger individuals with risk factors such as diabetes or asthma.
Key results showed no meaningful reduction in hospitalization or death. However, patients receiving Paxlovid recovered faster. Median recovery time was 14 days versus 21 days in PANORAMIC and 6 days versus 9 days in CanTreatCOVID. These findings suggest Paxlovid’s benefit in vaccinated populations may be limited to faster symptom resolution rather than prevention of severe disease, a significant takeaway.
Our Strange and (Almost) Unique Phenomenon of Big Pharma TV Ads
A few years ago I wrote a piece on those weird pharmaceutical names and their overwhelming advertising on TV – those “ask your doctor about” ads that we’re all inundated with. It’s even worse now; I’m up to 18, and they repeat continuously. I’m getting brainwashed into asking my doctor about them, whether or not I have any such condition.
Where do these weird names come from and why are they so prevalent on TV? Most of the names don’t seem to relate to the condition they’re supposed to alleviate, and I’d have a hard time asking my doctor anyway because I can’t pronounce them.
According to International Business Times, proposed names are “products of a high-stakes creative exercise that marries the magic of marketing with consumer psychology and scientific testing.” Sounds like a load of waffle to me; a few-minutes brainstorming could probably do as well or better.
It’s significant that the US is one of only two countries in which prescription pharmaceuticals are even allowed to be directly advertised to consumers (New Zealand). And according to Statistica, about $5 billion a year is spent doing it — so it must work. As high as that is, according to a Pew fact sheet much more is spent on marketing and promoting to doctors — those same doctors we’re supposed to trust when we “ask your doctor about …”
The WHO Is Building a Supranational Vaccine Authorization Mechanism
This admission of a conflict of interest was made by Prof. Lester Schulman, secretary of the Ministry of Health’s polio committee, in March 2023, during an internal discussion about approving the importation into Israel of a new polio vaccine.
The vaccine was developed and promoted by the World Health Organization in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and its approval pathway relied on a new emergency authorization mechanism the WHO has developed in recent years: the EUL (Emergency Use Listing).
Although the remark was framed as a technical aside, it was an unusual confession of a conflict of interest by the committee’s secretary. Its seriousness is compounded by the fact that it was made only after the committee had already voted by an overwhelming majority to initiate the process of bringing the vaccine to Israel, and after it had already worked vigorously to persuade the Pharmaceutical Division to cooperate.
The quotation does not appear in the official minutes of the meeting that were provided to us. It is heard on an audio recording of the session, one of several recordings passed on to us by a whistleblower. The minutes were provided only following a Freedom of Information request and subsequent litigation.
