Think of it this way: If I buy a second ticket in a 100,000,000-to-one lottery, I can say I reduced my Relative Risk of losing the lottery by 50%; or I can say my Absolute Risk is now at 50,000,000/1. Both are true. Which is more relevant to my decision? I still need to buy 50 million more tickets. How much are they?
This is not a trivial game. I have been part of decisions by cancer patients that went like this: "You should do the chemotherapy. Studies show it reduces your chances of dying in the next three years by 20%." When pressed, that meant from 5% to 4%, an absolute reduction of 1%. Makes a big difference when you're deciding whether you want to pay all the costs of chemotherapy. It's not a simple decision, you need to know the answers to a lot of things before making it, and it is your right alone to make it.
As the Lancet authors point out "Vaccine efficacy is generally reported as a relative risk reduction" and "ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size." The numbers you always hear--95% for the Pfizer, 94% for Moderna--are, of course, the RRR numbers. The somewhat less-impressive ARR numbers you never hear--derived from their own trials--are 0.84% for Pfizer and 1.2% for Moderna.
This translates into another relevant data point: NNV--the Number of people Needed to Vaccinate to prevent one more case of COVID-19. That number is 117 for Pfizer and 76 for Moderna. So, with the Pfizer genetic "app," you need to turn between 117 people into spike-protein factories to prevent 1 more case of Covid.
No one--neither an individual cancer patient nor the whole of society--can make a reasonable, scientifically-informed decision about whether to take--let alone whether to force everyone to take--these vaccines without all this information. RRR should never be presented without ARR, as if it's the only relevant metric. Per the Lancet study: "With the use of only RRRs, and omitting ARRs, reporting bias is introduced, which affects the interpretation of vaccine efficacy. When communicating about vaccine efficacy, especially for public health decisions," having a full picture of what the data actually show is important." Ya think? Is that not the fundamental, indispensable scientific (and ethico-politcal) attitude?
Yet, we are in a situation where the full picture is deliberately and systematically hidden. I venture to say, far fewer than 1/117 media or medical-bureaucracy reports about these vaccines, and far fewer people--including leftists--taking adamant "follow the science" stances in favor of a pass-law, checkpoint regime that throws millions out of work have any awareness of this simple consideration of RRR and ARR. And the people thrown out of work and school and house-arrested because they are aware of this (and other considerations) and are making perfectly reasonable, scientifically-informed decisions on that basis, are being portrayed as being nothing but stupid and selfish.
All, the Way
Yet another way of considering efficacy and risk is to look at what is increasingly considered the best metric for evaluating the net positive effect of new drugs: all-cause mortality and morbidity. The logic is simple and irrefutable: We do not get an accurate assessment of the real health benefit by just measuring how effective a drug or vaccine is in preventing illness or death from the specific disease it targets.
It's very unlikely that complex therapeutics like these vaccines will have no effect on anything else in the human body--and therefore public health--but the Covid virus. You must look for those other effects. Personally, if a vaccine reduces the risk of dying from Covid by 2X while increasing your risk of dying from a heart attack by 4X or getting sick from cancer by 3X, it does more harm than good. Socially, if the vaccinated population has fewer Covid deaths but also has more deaths overall than the unvaccinated population, you've got a problem that needs to be investigated--if you bother to see it.
Vaccine recipients need to know the total net risk-benefit to their health, and society to public health, not just the effect on a particular disease. If it does not improve the total risk of disease or death, it is not worth it--and it certainly cannot be mandated.
As Dr. J. Bart Classen points out, in his study of Covid vaccines:
Many fields of medicine, oncology for example, have abandoned the use of disease specific endpoints for the primary endpoint of pivotal clinical trials... and have adopted "all cause mortality or morbidity" as the proper scientific endpoint of a clinical trial".
[With anti-cancer drugs,] many of the toxic chemotherapeutic agents would destroy vital organs and actually reduce survival while decreasing cancer deaths at the same time. The FDA and comparable agencies around the world switched to "all cause mortality" as the primary endpoint for pivotal cancer drug trials...
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