ZH: Vaccines – too little, too late?

ZERO HEDGE reports:

(Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog)

Trust in institutions, authorities and Big Pharma are scraping the bottom of the barrel, and rushing these vaccines into mass use with extremely high expectations of efficacy is setting up the potential for a devastating loss of trust in the vaccines should they fail to live up to the claims of 100% safety and 95% effectiveness.

We’re being assured by Pfizer and Moderna that their Covid vaccines are 95% effective and are safe enough to be injected into hundreds of millions of people. Before accepting these extremely consequential claims, let’s look at the actual testing process and results.

In the Pfizer trial, half of the 44,000 volunteers received the vaccine and the other half got a placebo shot. Then the researchers waited around to see how many of the volunteers randomly came down with Covid. Pfizer reported that out of 170 cases of Covid, 162 were in the placebo group and eight were in the vaccine group.

So a total of 0.386% of the 44,000 volunteers came down with Covid by means unknown, and this tiny sample is the foundation of grandiose claims of 95% effectiveness? Note the incredibly small sample size. If even 3% of the test group had contracted Covid, the sample size would be 1,320 people–still a small number but considerably more persuasive than 1/3rd of 1% (170).

These results tell us very little about what we really need to know. Allow me to propose a test protocol that would tell us what we need to know.

Take 100 politicians, authorities and Big Pharma executives, give them two doses of vaccine and then have them serve 4-hour shifts in a crowded ward of severely ill Covid patients for a week, without any masks or protective gear. In other words, expose them to sustained, intimate contact with patients with severe cases of Covid, spending hours every day in a soup of virus.