I’m science dumb too, I just like questioning things and reading lol. I’ll try to collect some things for this

I’m not science dumb but I’m not a doctor or a pharmacist or anything so I am kinda medicine dumb. What I say mostly comes from a very close friend who is a doctor (kinda like Ben Shapiro’s wife), the father of another close friend of mine who works as a director to a hospital, and stuff I read. So I’d prefer someone who actually works as a pharmacologist or a medical doctor or something like that to do that.

This will be tested but unfortunately it is much harder to test it than just basic efficacy tests and it will take much more time. Like, in order to test that you have to have 1) someone vaccinated 2) that same person contracting COVID 3) confirming that that person has contracted COVID, 4) that person being in an environment where they can give COVID to other people, 5) determining if they ended up giving COVID to these people and 6) ascertaining that it was indeed them who gave the other people COVID. So that is a very non-trivial test. It is important though and I have even heard of some proposed tests to gather some volunteers and infect them on purpose after vaccinating them to see if they can transmit it to each other, how they cope etc. Which, like, sounds pretty scary and it will probably be some time before anything like that can happen, if it ever does. So it’s not a trivial test and we shouldn’t expect results like that to be confirmed any time soon.

So we have-

Pfizer didn’t make exclusion criteria accessible (but it was able to be found, author had to make an edit)

Fever of 104+ not being in this particular paper even though this side effect has been noted enough that casual journalism has shared this fact

And that Pfizer had a direct hand in writing/publishing the paper the author is responding to.

So I ask out of curiosity, what this article does for you and what you’re skeptical about? Does an imperfectly written paper on the topic discredit the vaccine in your eyes?

The issue with whether or not people who have received the vaccine can still transmit the disease is known and from what I know it is normal that it wouldn’t be known so soon, because it is harder to test.

I did find a very lengthy document that details the trial protocols of the Pfizer vaccine. It does say they excluded pregnant women, people who had recently received a transfusion, immunosuppressed patients and some other groups so that answers the concern of the author for these groups. I am not sure if it included the allergy thing because it is extremely long and I’m not gonna go through the entire 197 pages. If it doesn’t include people with strong allergic reactions to other vaccines, that’s weird and irresponsible and I don’t even understand why they would do that (when they do mention other excluded groups) but it’s not an instant disqualification either.

EDIT: So I just noticed that the author does mention in an edit to their article that they DID eventually find the paper I talked about, and they raise the concern that it wasn’t adequately cited so they could find it earlier. Maybe they have a point there, although I found it pretty easily.

But in any case, the vaccine is out now. We can see the results. And so far, it’s going… Fine? We saw hundreds of thousands of people get vaccinated and the worst adverse reactions were 3 non life threatening anaphylaxis cases which can now easily been addressed. The point about anaphylactic reactions in the countryside is kinda moot because it’s gonna be a long time before the vaccine will reach people in the countryside who don’t have access to hospitals, and so far there have been 3 such reactions out of a few hundred thousand. Vaccinations start from healthcare workers, who are the very definition of people who have access to hospital facilities.

The part that talks about headaches, chills and muscle pains is… Eh? Like, I really don’t care if I have a headache for a couple days if it means I won’t get covid ? Apparently it’s more common than with other vaccines. I don’t see why that should be a major red flag or unexpected, especially not “the whoppers”. I read the report by that volunteer who got a high fever. But apparently that did not last very long at all and all side effects subsided after a day. That’s… Not so bad, if it’s only a rare case.

What I found really odd was this:

Given the fact that this virus is largely asymptomatic in more than half the people infected, what exactly are we doing here?

This is in relation to the fact that about half the people will experience some kind of side effect from the vaccine. What is implied here is that the vaccine will be… Worse than covid for some people because they may get some side effect? Sorry, but the most common side effects (namely the ones that a big percentage of people may get) are fatigue (by far the most common), chills and headaches. If some people who weren’t going to have temporary headaches end up having headaches in exchange of… People dying or permanently scarring their lungs after torturous days in an ICU, that’s certainly good, no?

The article also says this:

It is very important to note that based on the trial’s own data, conveniently laid out on the very top of the figure in green, blue, orange and red, a temperature of 104.9F or 40.5 C is described as a Grade 4 event. The definition of a Grade 4 event is anything that is life-threatening or disabling. A fever of 104.9 can have grave consequences for any adult and is absolutely a Grade 4 event.

OK, but did the trial say specifically a 104.9 degree fever is a Grade 4 event, or did it just say Grade 4 events are life threatening or disabling? Because I’m not a doctor but a brief fever of 104.9 degrees (which subsided before she even called them to report it) isn’t in general life threatening. If it persisted throughout the day then yeah, alright. If it was their policy that any fever of 104.9 should be reported, then there is something amiss here.

The final concern is also kinda silly. It’s not a safety concern, it’s a concern that we don’t know yet if people who have received the vaccine can still spread the virus, and that if that is the case then apparently there is no point to it form a public health perspective. I’m sorry, what? This is obviously silly. Alright, let’s assume that you can still transmit the disease even after being vaccinated. Now let’s assume most of the population receives the vaccine. That STILL means hundreds of thousands of people will be saved from death, and the virus would no longer be a threat for anyone but the unvaccinated ones.

So overall there are some good points but it seems like the author is exaggerating some important things.

Opiates have legitimate medical usage which is why they have been approved by the FDA. A private company paying off doctors, pharmacies and insurance companies to push their drugs is not comparable to this, which is just a drug approval process. If Pfizer is caught pushing covid vaccines on people that don’t need them and lobbying against vaccine laws to keep the cash flow going you’re welcome to dunk on me

Why wouldn’t you every year? I never wanted to give some old/young person the flu and kill them and it’s not like I had 2 weeks worth of sick leave (who does?) I could burn through if i ever got sick.