Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire My concerns with the vaccine

Dr Bartlett at Free America Health and freedom Ralley

https://youtu.be/MhyQ1aVsSvQ

Oldhat, if I squint hard enough I can sort of see that you're almost making a good point here, and I'll help you with that. But first let's make sure we know what we mean by efficacy.

"Efficacy is the degree to which a vaccine prevents disease, and possibly also transmission, under ideal and controlled circumstances – comparing a vaccinated group with a placebo group. Effectiveness meanwhile refers to how well it performs in the real world." ... from a simple Google search for the difference between the two terms. (For those who disparage Google, you can find the same definitions in an epidemiology textbook, if you prefer, but it'll take you longer to find it.)

So what you're actually asking about is the effectiveness, not the efficacy. The efficacy is defined in trials, and is a more theoretical concept. The effectiveness is derived from actual use data, which is almost always a lower number than the efficacy. So in a hypothetical example, vaccine developers can say that a vaccine has an efficacy of 95%, but in the real world under real use conditions (which is affected by all manner of variables like exposure rate, compliance with the vaccine schedule, etc, as you point out) the vaccine's effectiveness will almost always be lower than the efficacy.

As an example, you can look at the earlier shingles vaccine, which came out about 8-10 years ago, which had an efficacy of 90+% in trials, but in actual use had an effectiveness of less than 50%.

In this case we don't actually have enough data to get a true number for the CoV2 vaccines' effectiveness, because it's still early in the study process. We'll have a pretty good number by early 2022, I expect. But these Texas numbers, which btw line up with similar data from all other states in the CONUS that I'm aware of, are HIGHER than the "theoretical" efficacy of 95%.

This is not something you can quibble about. This is not something you can say is confounded by a bunch of other factors. The success is unquestionable by any measure you can name. Using the word maybe, as you have done, is much like saying, "let's pretend...". It's a dodge, no more and no less.

"Maybe something is messing with those numbers, so I'm not going to give them any credence." This is the sort of thing that people say when they have decided they are not going to accept a set of facts that contradict what they are determined to believe no matter what.

Now: is the actual effectiveness of the CoV2 vaccines going to come in at 99.995%, as these raw Texas numbers seem to say? Almost certainly not. But it's pretty much clear that it's going to come in somewhere in the ballpark of the initial efficacy percentage from the trials.

Hahahaha!

Maybe CDC is working on a better test.......

With all due respect, I and my colleagues have been dealing with patients' distrust for our entire careers. It ain't a new thing. I've had azzhats like TRH try to argue with me about every kooky medical theory under the sun on a regular basis for 30+ years, and I have long since stopped caring about whether they "trust" me or not. My response is to smile, and say "have a nice day" as I show them the door. And if they come back in a week or a month later dying from ignoring best medical advice, I use my best skills to try to save their lives with every skill and piece of information I possess, and I never say "I told you so."

It's not my job to make you trust me, or another doctor. It's my job to give you the best advice I can, given the information I have in my hands at the time.

It is entirely up to each individual patient-person to decide what they want to do.

Ralph, all due respect... but since Dr. Bartlett has decided to re-define medical terms like "vaccine" in his own personal terms in defiance of the consensus of the rest of the profession, I have a hard time giving him the time of day. But you go right ahead, it's still a free country.

Actually I was simply speaking English as in ... Efficacy: "Power or capacity to produce a desired effect; effectiveness."

You were making a big deal about the low death rate among the vaccinated. Not me. You changed the subject to the generally vague notion of efficacy/effectivenessas used in the world of vaccines. It is vague because what the threshold of "disease" is is vague and not always measurable(sniffles or ????). Viral load would be much better.

Back to the actual subject of my response.

Your numbers, not mine, *could* be meaningless because of confounding factors. I'm using confounding factor as a term of art from statistical science. You should know what that means.

I use the word "could" because YOU gave the numbers with out full detail about the sample space for those numbers.

Thank you for the "behind the scenes" perspective.

How many work for Bausch + Lomb? 13,000 employees...how many are Chinese?

You know, this B&L..You putting Chinese developed drops in patients eyes????

https://www.bausch.com/



Addition: Did you ever place any B&L ophthalmics in patients eyes and they still lost vision or went blind..Was it the condition or the drops? Number of adverse events reported after the use of long term opthalmic preparations, that supposedly had an established safety profile? After a rare reported adverse event, did you ever again use that particular product on patients?

You guys are sure a suspicious lot. You believe the news about the fires, hot weather, floods out east, micro chip shortage, Olympics..., but mention Covid and it's all BS. Then too you are all talking about mortality. What about being sicker than you have ever been or risking getting an $850,000. hospital bill like our friend Kathy who is "recovered" with life long respiratory issues who needs a walker now to get around? Sure most people recover from Covid, but why risk getting it in the first place? My insurance man got it alone up at his cabin last bow season and he was so weak that he couldn't pick up his bow. He told me that he knew he was in trouble and that if he'd of had a manual transmission car, he might not have been able to make it back into town to get help. We could have achieved herd immunity by now if so many people didn't politicize the shot. Mississippi has the lowest vaccination rate in the nation and the highest Covid infection rate per capita. It might not be a coincidence that they also have the poorest education system in the country? You all have a small pox shot scar, got a polio shot, get a tetanus and your kid won't get into school without an MMR shot... But the CDC and Covid-19 or it's variants is all Bull S*it. Where does your moral high attitude come from by being a bull head? YOU are the reason that they are locking down the entire country again.

....They are going to have a problem, voting for Trump in 3 years while he tells them to be vaccinated. He just told them to do so a couple days ago...

Fair enough. But in fairness, you could go to the TX.gov website and get the numbers from them directly, get the background data from whatever public databses you care to, then do the analysis yourself rather than expecting me (or anyone else to do it).

If this sounds like a challenge to you, maybe it is...

Doc have you seen the Vaccine test in Serrana Brazil ? I think they were testing a Chinese Vaccine.

It looked pretty good to the untrained eye.

I'll try to give it a look. Chinese products ain't all bad, btw...

So, the Pfizer vax with a now reported success rate of only 39% by GB and Israel would have prevented that, right?