3 posts were merged into an existing topic: From coronavirus
Sheâs fine thanks. Itâs not so simple as that 
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Itâs pretty much de rigeur to include the Credo in any paper about vaccines - I mean experimental writeups, not just opinion pieces. Every single one of them includes that paragraph, or some variation of it, at the end of the conclusion. If you conclude with any suggestion that COVID vaccines are worthless you donât get published, simple as. Thatâs just how The Science⢠works these days.
The funny part is that the author of this note seem to have written that final paragraph in such a way that itâs logically jarring. Itâs like those âconfessionsâ that POWs and terrorist victims read out where they include coded language indicating that theyâre doing it under duress.
EDIT: Seems Iâm wrong about that. The author is Paul Offit, who is world-renowned for drawing conclusions which arenât even remotely congruent with the data. Heâs probably skipped over 70% of his own opinion piece and then just wrote down what he wants to believe; his conclusion is serious, and itâs logically jarring because heâs a clown. At least a bit of common sense has managed to seep through:
I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.
Here are the actual parts relating to my paraphrasing that âthey turned out to be a bit shitâ. You might recognize them as the bits you skipped over to get to the part you quoted (which is impressive in itself, because you had to ignore like 70% of the article):
On June 28, 2022, researchers from PfizerâBioNTech and Moderna presented data on their bivalent vaccines to the FDAâs Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (of which I am a member). The results were underwhelming. Bivalent boosters resulted in levels of neutralizing antibodies against BA.1 that were only 1.5 to 1.75 times as high as those achieved with monovalent boosters. Previous experience with the companiesâ vaccines suggested that this difference was unlikely to be clinically significant.
On September 1, 2022, the FDA withdrew its emergency use authorization for monovalent vaccine boosters and the CDC recommended bivalent vaccine boosters for everyone 12 years of age or older. On October 12, 2022, the CDC extended this recommendation to include everyone 5 years of age or older. At that point, no data from humans, including immunogenicity data, were available for comparing the relative capacities of the monovalent and bivalent vaccines to protect against BA.4 and BA.5.
On October 24, 2022, David Ho and colleagues released the results of a study examining levels of neutralizing antibodies against BA.4 and BA.5 after receipt of a monovalent or bivalent booster dose. They found âno significant difference in neutralization of any SARS-CoV-2 variant,â including BA.4 and BA.5, between the two groups. 3 One day later, Dan Barouch and colleagues released the results of a similar study, finding that âBA.5 [neutralizing-antibody] titers were comparable following monovalent and bivalent mRNA boosters.â Barouch and colleagues also noted no appreciable differences in CD4+ or CD8+ T-cell responses between participants in the monovalent-booster group and those in the bivalent-booster group.4 Neither research group found the bivalent boosters to elicit superior immune responses. The results are now published in the Journal .
Why did the strategy for significantly increasing BA.4 and BA.5 neutralizing antibodies using a bivalent vaccine fail? The most likely explanation is imprinting. The immune systems of people immunized with the bivalent vaccine, all of whom had previously been vaccinated, were primed to respond to the ancestral strain of SARS-CoV-2. They therefore probably responded to epitopes shared by BA.4 and BA.5 and the ancestral strain, rather than to new epitopes on BA.4 and BA.5. This effect could possibly be moderated by immunizing people either with BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA alone or with a greater quantity of BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA. Evidence in support of these strategies can be found in PfizerâBioNTechâs data regarding its BA.1-containing bivalent vaccine, which showed that BA.1-specific neutralizing-antibody responses were greater in persons who were injected with a monovalent vaccine containing 30 Îźg or 60 Îźg of BA.1 mRNA or a bivalent vaccine containing 30 Îźg of BA.1 mRNA and 30 Îźg of ancestral-strain mRNA than in those who received a bivalent vaccine containing 15 Îźg of each type of mRNA.
On November 22, 2022, the CDC published data on the effectiveness of the BA.4 and BA.5 mRNA vaccines for preventing symptomatic infection within 2 months after receipt of the booster dose. For people who had received a monovalent vaccine 2 to 3 months earlier, the extra protection associated with the bivalent booster dose ranged from 28 to 31%. For those who had received a monovalent vaccine more than 8 months earlier, the extra protection ranged from 43 to 56%. 5 Given the results of previous studies, itâs likely that this moderate increase in protection against probably generally mild disease will be short lived. As of November 15, 2022, only about 10% of the population for whom the bivalent vaccine had been recommended had received it.5 By December 2022, the BA.4 strain was no longer circulating, and BA.5 accounted for less than 25% of circulating SARS-CoV-2 strains, having been partially replaced by more immune-evasive strains, such as BQ.1, BQ.1.1, BF.7, XBB, and XBB.1.
I quoted the summary which began with the following sentence:
What lessons can be learned from our experience with bivalent vaccines?
Well, I suggest reading the rest of the article then.
I did read the entire article. It was quite short.
How odd that thatâs the part you chose to quote then, rather than the majority of the article describing how the bivalent vaccines proved a bit shit.
I think weâre in agreement that the data show bivalent booster doses provide minimal to no significant difference in protection over monovalent boosters so thereâs that.
Well praise be. Thereâs a nice change.
And thatâs what I was responding to in the first place - @afterspivak saying that it was âinterestingâ or something that the new batch of quasivaccines are monovalent rather than bivalent. Personally Iâm mostly just surprised they havenât rolled out a tri- or tetravalent one yet. 
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Change? The summary I quoted clearly stated that:
"Although boosting with a bivalent vaccine is likely to have a similar effect as boosting with a monovalent vaccine, . . . "
Dr. Phillip Buckhaultâs Testimony on DNA Contamination in Pfizerâs mRNA Vaccine
Dr. Buckhaults was alarmed at the findings of DNA contaminants, and whatâs admirable about him is his courage to address what he found, despite being previously seen as âpro-mRNAâ.
Just came across this little nugget of nonsense in the Taipei Times, courtesy of the illustrious éłĺťşäť (an epidemiologist by training and onetime head of the NSC):
Trial data, published in top-rated international scientific journals, showed the effectiveness of the Medigen vaccine, Chen said.
Taipei allowed Medigen to waive phase 3 clinical trials, as achieving the requisite sample size was not possible in Taiwan, which had a relatively low number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, he said.
So, letâs break that down: the Taiwan authorities allowed a new pharmaceutical product onto the market without any meaningful testing, potentially to be used on millions of people under the terms of a mandate, for a disease so dangerous that they couldnât even find enough subjects to test it on, and were only later able to claim that the product was âeffectiveâ (although I note he is not claiming that it is âsafeâ).
Letâs be clear: this guy is an expert in his field. He is not a random idiot who doesnât understand what heâs saying.
The Medigen vaccine was as effective as to BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, and superior by a large margin to AstraZeneca in preventing deaths and serious symptoms, Chen said, citing a study published in the scientific journal Infectious Diseases.
âClinical trials conducted across the globe showed that the Medigen vaccine is a good one,â he said.
I suppose if your baseline is âcompletely uselessâ then maybe it is better, but if it was so wonderful then how come so few people took it? Oh, right, itâs because it was useless for international travel permits - which was the one and only reason most people got jabbed in the first place.
Regarding some KMT lawmakersâ claims that more than 1,000 Medigen stockholders are Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members, Chen said the company in question is publicly traded and does not keep any documentation about of its stockholdersâ party affiliation.
So is it true or isnât it? âI donât knowâ doesnât refute the position of people who claim that they do know. I guess itâs lucky DPP members arenât required to declare conflicts of interest in political decisions, isnât it?
Rumors claiming that documents about the development of the Medigen vaccines were classified for 30 years are âfake news,â Chen said.
The allegedly sealed documents were thoroughly examined by prosecutors, Control Yuan members and lawmakers in the course of investigations into about 60 allegations against the vaccine, all of which were disproved, he said.
Asked to comment on DPP presidential candidate Vice President William Laiâs (čł´ć¸ ĺžˇ) support for publishing Medigenâs vaccine contract, Chen said the government is in the process of renegotiating the terms of nondisclosure agreements.
So theyâre not âsealedâ, merely restricted to a need-to-know group of people. Okey dokey.
And the piece de resistance:
Spreading false information about medicine is unethical and potentially illegal, the CDC said, adding that it urges Tsai to be mindful of his social responsibilities.
Perhaps Chen might want to review some of the claims made by the CECC over the last few years and see how many of them were false, unethical or potentially illegal?
If this is the sorry state of The Science⢠in Taiwan, Iâm glad I never took any notice of The Science. And the DPP wonder why theyâre losing political ground.
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I really wish this type of nonsense was limited to just the DPP. Covid propaganda and fear mongering certainly isnât limited to here. At least the covid vaccine mandates are kind of going away.
This continues to be a really wacky one. Meanwhile, in Taiwan, influenza continues to Trump covids ass without any mandates. Or soap in washrooms 
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Yes, there werenât many dissenters on the KMT side of the aisle when the DPP government were busy rolling out all kinds of nonsensical and draconian restrictions during 2021. IIRC KMT strongholds were as bad if not worse than deep-green ones. Pretty much the same thing was true in every other country - âthe oppositionâ failed to oppose.
What gets me about this sort of report is the unmitigated weaselliness. I mean have a look at that part about DPP shareholders. Youâre the Premier. Go and bloody find out the answer instead of making threadbare excuses. How many DPP politicians were involved in insider trading in Medigen shares? I bet it wasnât zero. Anyone who was anyone cashed in on Pfizer and Modernaâs payday, and they havenât even bothered hiding it; they know the SEC isnât coming after them. Itâd be damn surprising if the same thing hadnât happened in Taiwan.
Every government on the planet is frantically memory-holing everything they did, and theyâre just making themselves look worse because everyone can remember what they did.
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No matter which party youâre talking about, always be midful of the distinction between mere members of a party and actual politicians.
As for finding information, why not ask the people who made the claim?